Twitter and IBM Hook Up for Business Insights

Twitter and IBM have formed an alliance to help businesses and institutions better understand their customers, markets and trends.

The partnership integrates Twitter data with IBM's cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms and consulting services. IBM will offer this combination as part of certain services including IBM Watson Analytics, which provides access to natural language based predictive and visual analytics for business users.

The firms will also deliver a set of enterprise applications, the first of which will integrate Twitter data with IBM's ExperienceOne customer engagement solutions, to allow clients to map consumer sentiment and behavior. In addition, the firms will collaborate to develop solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail, and travel and transportation.

IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty (pictured) comments: 'Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world - as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of trends. This partnership, drawing on IBM's lcloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data.'

Web sites: www.ibm.com and www.twitter.com .