IBM’s decision to partner with Twitter would serve huge benefits

An executive from each company explains why they did this data analytic partnership

Almost a week earlier we got to know that IBM and Twitter are going into a partnership, the nature of which will be data analytics. Coming together of the two companies is going to allow the former to incorporate the latter’s data into its products for businesses. Hearing about their partnership, we must have thought for a first impression that what do these two companies have to do with one another but there is always some way to achieve a crazy idea which is believed by both IBM’s Alistair Rennie, general manager of the company’s Business Analytics group, and Twitter’s Chris Moody, its vice president of data strategy.

Fortune magazine got to know some pretty useful information on this partnership when it interviewed these two officials from the respective companies at the Mandalay Bay casino and hotel in Las Vegas. During the interview, Rennie explained that there would be three basic elements to this. Twitter data would first be integrated with IBM’s cloud analytics tool and this step is going to make it easier for the customers to reach it. She further explained how both the companies are going to team up together to make solutions for very specific business needs, such as marketing and customer care and lastly “IBM will train and certify 10,000 consultants on a global basis to be experts of the Twitter platform.”

Moody further went on to discuss Twitter’s role on the collaboration which has raised my brows and while he did so he explained how the social networking platform has paired with a couple of executives and has “big brand relationships with companies advertising on Twitter.” According to Moody, executives are more interested in knowing how advertisements on the site can be made more interactive and attractive and for such purposes, Twitter can provide them with data, very large volumes of raw data to be precise, which isn’t really useful in any way. The problem is that the data has a lot of potential to be developed into something very useful but there is only a lack of someone who would interfere to help and build value on top of it and combine it with other data sources.

Considering its popularity, the social networking platform is the largest and most important rchive of human thought and it won’t entirely be wrong to say that it represents the voice of the planet.

“Like any application of analytics, the driver is never technology—it’s business outcome. The more data you can bring to that problem, especially when it’s an incredibly unique dataset like Twitter, the analytics become better and the decisions become clearer,” said Rennie.

Moody also said that most of the consumer companies often find that they’re spending time dragging themselves out of a hole to get the customer back to being okay with their service. And Twitter is a platform where everyone shares their experiences quite openly and this gives companies a chance to have a look around and see where their product really stands in the eyes of the customer.

source: fortune