The US technology giant is offering to trawl through Tweets posted on the micro-blogging site, evaluate and analyze them for the benefit of its business clients.
A half a billion Tweets appear daily on Twitter and, with the help of intelligent analytical tools, trends can be identified and client requests can be fished out of that heap of data, Alistair Rennie, manager of IBM's analytics unit, said at CeBIT, the world's largest information technology fair, which is taking place this week in the northern German city of Hanover.
IBM plans to analyze Tweets in real time through cloud technology and its Watson supercomputer, which has been trained to understand Tweets. Clients in such areas as telecommunications, retail sales and health care could then search out information that interests them.
Such a thing has not been possible before and will fundamentally change the rules of the game for businesses, Rennie said.
The initiative was announced after IBM and Twitter started their partnership at the end of October.
IBM Analytics' Bob Picciano said cloud computing has elementally altered the dynamic of the information technology transformation.
The company was an early investor in the so-called Big Data area of the business, the analysis of enormous masses of data.
"We've invested 24 billion dollars in the area in recent years," Picciano said.
©2015 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
