IBM, Twitter Analytics Tool Now Open To All: Partners Cheer

IBM and Twitter unveiled a lineup of new "insight as a service" offerings Tuesday to allow customers and business partners to more easily extract actionable business intelligence from the estimated 500 million tweets sent each day.

In October, IBM and Twitter kicked off their partnership, but since then have limited the number of companies breaking in the technology to 100. Now, IBM and Twitter are opening up the program to developers and businesses, allowing them to build apps using IBM's Bluemix development tool and also streamlining the integration of Twitter data with IBM analytics services in the cloud.

IBM partners said the IBM and Twitter partnership is a potential game-changer when it comes to cracking the Holy Grail of consumer data buried inside of the Twitter-verse.

[Related: Winds Of Change At IBM: Will Partners Be Blown Away? ]

"Anytime you can turn data into actionable, useable information with analytics, that's extremely powerful," said Teya Tuccio-Flick, vice president of marketing at Whereoware, a Washington, D.C.-based digital agency that has been doing business with IBM just for the past year. "We have just begun discussions with IBM about what its analytics technology can do for our business. This is a unique solution, and we are very eager to learn more."

The launch comes on the heels of a massive internal shake-up at IBM in January, which included an unspecified number of layoffs and an internal reorganization of business units, as well as a folding of its hardware and software partners under one roof. IBM said the moves allowed it to more efficiently capitalize on high-margin opportunities and focus business on cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security.

"As IBM has been seeking to reinvent itself, Twitter has been seeking to invent itself as a profitable business that can monetize its data in a manner that maintains trust among its members," said Tony Baer, principal analyst at research firm Ovum, in a research note.

The IBM and Twitter partnership allows businesses to analyze Twitter data while correlating millions of bits of information from public and business data streams, including weather forecasts, sales data and inventory stats.

Key to the partnership is IBM's Watson artificial intelligence systems that will allow developers to better identify and spot patterns and relationships between Twitter and third-party data streams.

"With select cluster configurations of BigInsights on Cloud preconfigured with access to Twitter content, clients can combine Twitter data with IBM's full-featured Enterprise Hadoop-as-a-Service offering, also available through IBM Bluemix," describes IBM.

For many partners, the IBM and Twitter relationship is a wait-and-see opportunity they look forward to being brought to market. Meanwhile, existing services from Adobe, Oracle, and startups such as DataSift, have enjoyed an early lead when it comes to mining social media data for insights.

For IBM, the Twitter partnership already has produced results and helped glean insights. IBM and Twitter said they have helped businesses connect the dots between employee turnover and customer dissatisfaction, weather events and customer loyalty, and fashion bloggers and sales.

"The unprecedented partnership between IBM and Twitter helps businesses tap into billions of real-time conversations to make smarter decisions," said Glenn Finch, global leader of big data and analytics for IBM Global Business Services, in a statement.

PUBLISHED MARCH 17, 2015