Twitter and IBM reach agreement to analyze public data for business needs

IBM and Twitter have struck a deal to bring together big data and small tweets to solve business problems.

Twitter Inc.'s microblogging service represents an enormous public archive of ideas and opinions that can signal trends and potential business opportunities. The company said that businesses regularly want guidance on how to incorporate this information into their operations.

IBM, meanwhile, has experience with analyzing data and is looking to beef up its business services.

Under the agreement announced Wednesday, IBM will have access to Twitter's data that it can then put to use for its business clients. The company plans to use this access to enhance a number of its products and consulting services. That includes adding Twitter data analysis to some of its new cloud services and making the information available to tens of thousands of IBM consultants.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world — as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of trends," IBM's CEO, Ginni Rometty, said in a statement. "This partnership ... will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data."

Twitter's stock was down $1.62 to $42.16 in afternoon trading. Shares in International Business Machines Corp. slipped 30 cents to $163.30.