And now business professionals and developers will be able to extract actionable business insights from Twitter data after IBM and Twitter announced the availability of industry-firstcloud data services. With more than 100 early client engagements underway, the IBM and Twitter global partnership is already helping enterprise clients apply social data to business decisions. But for business professionals to do more than social listening – to be able to use Twitter data to inform their organization’s most essential decisions -– they must first isolate the signal from the noise. IBM does this by enriching and analyzing Twitter data in combination with millions of data points from other streams of public and business data – such as weather forecasts, sales information and product inventory stats – to uncover powerful correlations that drive more actionable insights. “So much of business decision making relies on internal data such as sales, promotion and inventory. Now with Twitter data, customer feedback can easily be incorporated into decision making,” said Chris Moody, Vice President of Data Strategy at Twitter. “IBM’s unique capabilities can help businesses leverage this valuable data, and we expect to see rapid demand in retail, telecommunications, finance and more.” The new IBM analytics services on the cloud will help businesses and developers create Social Data-Enabled Apps where developers and entrepreneurs can search, quickly explore and then mine enriched Twitter content and aggregated insights through IBM’s Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix. It will also be possible to merge Sophisticated, Predictive Analytics with Twitter Data. By automating the steps of data curation, predictive analysis and visual storytelling, Watson Analytics can give business professionals the ability to immediately pull Twitter data into any project in order identify and explain hidden patterns and relationships to accelerate the understanding of why things happen and what’s likely to happen. With select cluster configurations of BigInsights on Cloud pre-configured 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. Fashion Forward with Social Insight is also a possibility with the new service. Twitter is an effective demand signal for the apparel industry because as focused as it may be on individual commentary, this creates a compelling picture of worldwide trends.
