IBM seems to be making a habit of strange alliances with consumer-centric brands. We’ll soon see the first actual products from its partnership with Apple, and now it has formed an alliance with Twitter to help develop and sell products based on analysis of tweets.
Picture: Getty Images/Mike Lawrie
The partnership will involve two key elements: IBM getting access to Twitter’s data stream for use in its Watson analytics tool, and IBM developing its own business-facing apps, particularly for customer relationship management, which make use of that data stream. That’s a similar approach to the Apple deal, which relies on IBM developing business apps for iPad users.
Underlying both these arrangements seems to be the same core idea: IBM knows a lot more about how to sell to large enterprises than anyone else is likely to. Twitter doesn’t have the obsessive cult of secrecy that defines Apple and it expends considerable effort on dealing with developers, so it might be argued that it needs IBM a little less. On the other hand, Twitter’s own efforts at analysing its massive streams of data are still fairly basic. Drawing on IBM’s expertise in data analysis won’t hurt. As ever, though, we won’t know for sure if it’s a good idea until actual products appear.
[via Business Insider]
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