Twitter, IBM join forces to solve business problems

American multinational IBM and micro-blogging site Twitter have forged a key alliance, where Twitter data would be used to solve business problems via IBM's cloud-based analytics platform.

This alliance will let enterprises incorporate Twitter data into their decision-making through an established set of IBM tools, solutions and consulting services, Twitter announced in a statement.

"This partnership, drawing on IBM's leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is re-imagining work," said Ginni Rometty, chairman and CEO, IBM.

"While companies have long listened to what their customers are saying on Twitter, complex enterprise decisions often require input from a lot of different systems. IBM's expertise is in integrating complex systems and data to make better decisions," the statement added.

From a data perspective, Twitter represents an enormous public archive of human thought that captures the ideas, opinions and debates taking place around the world on almost any topic at any moment in time.

"Twitter's data efforts started when we first made our public data available for analysis. Since then, we have made great progress in getting social data into the hands of decision makers," the statement read.

Twitter generated $70 million in data licensing revenue in 2013 and has generated $100 million in the first three quarters this year.