Twitter, IBM, in deal to create brainy Big Blue Bird

IBM and Twitter have assembled their buzzwords, ranked them into a regiment, and jointly set them loose to march upon a waiting world, by announcing that the avian network will feed data galore to Big Blue's cloudy enterprise big data analytics offerings.

Did El Reg add that the pair are promising to transform businesses and institutions with customer engagement platforms and consulting services? Consider it said.

What IBM's announcement boils down to is that the kind of capabilities pursued by other outfits – taking the firehose-feed of users' Tweets – are Big Blue's next move in big data.

To that end, IBM says it will be integrating Twitter with “selected cloud-based services” like its Watson Analytics, which will provide access to its outputs down to mobiles and tablets so that marketing executives under a Tweet-storm can get panic attacks at the press of a button.

There's also a data refinement service designed to deliver clean data to app developers, and devs will also be able to integrate Twitter feeds into services built on the IBM Watson Developer Cloud or the Blumix platform-as-a-service.

The partners are going to integrate Twitter into the IBM ExperienceOne customer engagement solution, as first step in a more general rollout of Tweets into what will be a suite of enterprise applications.

That'll all be topped off with specialised consulting service from IBM, which among other things will help create verticalised apps for the usual suspects – banking, retail, travel, transport and consumer products. IBM's digital agency, Interactive Experience, will also feed into the services offering. ®