Twitter forms alliance with IBM to track customer sentiment for businesses

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Tomohiro Ohsumi

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Twitter and IBM have formed an alliance to help businesses inform decisions with insight about customers, markets and trends.

Patrick Hoge

Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have formed an alliance to help businesses and institutions inform decisions with insights about their customers, markets and trends.

The partnership pairs Twitter's trove of customer sentiment data gleaned from "the public pulse of the planet" with IBM's cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms and consulting services, the two companies said Wednesday.

The companies said integrating social data with "enterprise" data can help accelerate product development by predicting long-term trends and drive real-time demand forecasting based on factors like weather patterns.

"This important partnership with IBM will change the way business decisions are made - from identifying emerging market opportunities to better engaging clients, partners and employees," promised Dick Costolo, San Francisco-based Twitter's CEO.

Despite such potential, Wednesday's partnership announcement did not immediately impress investors. Twitter continued to slide following a 14 percent drop Tuesday prompted by disclosures of disappointing user engagement and growth data. Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, which has been trying to reinvent itself as a leader of cloud computing, was also slightly down.

IBM plans to offer Twitter data as part of select cloud-based services, including IBM Watson Analytics, a new cognitive service that provides users with visualization and predictive capabilities. In addition, IBM will enable developers to embed Twitter data services into applications built on IBM technology.

The first joint product IBM and Twitter will offer will integrate Twitter data with

Patrick covers technology.