IBM and Twitter have announced the availability of industry-first cloud data services that allow business professionals and developers to extract actionable business insights from Twitter data. 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.

Twitter is like no other data source in the world. It is a real-time, public, conversational and global information platform where voices from around the world are speaking about every topic imaginable. 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,” he added.

“The unprecedented partnership between IBM and Twitter helps businesses tap into billions of real-time conversations to make smarter decisions,” said Glenn Finch, Global Leader of Big Data & Analytics for IBM Global Business Services. “Through unique expertise, curation and insights Twitter data is now able to inform decision-making far inside organizations,” he added.