IBM has joined forces with Twitter

Computing goliath IBM has signed a deal with Twitter to use tweets to make smarter business decisions. The agreement will let IBM’s 10,000 consultants access the some 500 million tweets the social-media firm sees each day, the Wall Street Journal reports. Together, the companies will build new services to assist various industries in gauging public opinion on brands, products and ideas, as well as forecast prospects for business development.

International Business Machines Corp. and Twitter Inc. announced a far-reaching alliance to apply data from the microblogging service to solve business problems. The deal is designed to marry IBM’s analytics software and large consulting staff with the huge volumes of information Twitter generates about users’ action and opinions. IBM will have access to the full public stream of tweets as they are posted, as well as all tweets generated since Twitter was founded in 2006, the companies said Wednesday. The data will be shared with IBM’s roughly 10,000 consultants to help solve client problems. Big Blue and Twitter plan to work together to develop new applications and services based on the information. The companies said they would allow third-party developers to integrate Twitter data into new cloud services they build using IBM’s tools.