IBM Partners With Twitter For Data Analytics

The deal would encompass the digital and data units of the Atlanta-based company but not the Weather Channel cable network. The company also redesigned more than 15 core analytics and commerce solutions with Apache®Spark™ - helping to dramatically accelerate their real-time processing capabilities.

Even as one of the largest technology companies in the world, the breadth and scale of data analytics across industries is too much for IBM to fully cover on its own.

IBM made the announcement at its Insight 2015 conference here.

This agreement will enable us to gather new insights on our fans that will allow us to be more efficient in our operations and provide a more personal and enhanced experience for all of our guests.

Weather Company data includes historical and forecasted weather data - as an example, IBM says an insurance company could use this to alert their customers to adverse weather conditions, potentially reducing claims and improving customer satisfaction. This new service promises to help clients stream unstructured data into insights, changing critical business outcomes across industries such as insurance, retail, and media and entertainment. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that IBM is nearing a deal to acquire Weather Channel's digital and data assets.

IBM Insight Cloud Services are available in different forms such as IBM Insight APIs for developers, IBM Insight Data Packages for weather and IBM Industry Analytics Solutions.

Away from the tech pimping, one high profile use case that was thrown into the mix was the Ottawa Sentators ice hockey team which is tapping into behavior-based, predictive analytics technologies in search of deeper understanding of its fan base, specifically their actions and thinking as individual consumers.

By applying a combination of advanced imaging, natural language processing, and machine learning technologies, a new cognitive offering, IBM Datacap Insight Services, that can automatically classify and understand the document - including format and structure, as well words and numeric information - from any document type to quickly and accurately determine the appropriate action to take. The new service combines internal business data with external data about people, events, geo-spatial factors, and businesses from sources like Twitter and the Weather Channel to offer greater access to valuable data that can be analyzed and turned into actionable intelligence. Two additional APIs allow developers to integrate Twitter content into third party apps. These initial services will be enhanced over time as more and more data sources are added and data scientists and engineers help address new and emerging client challenges.