Supercomputer Watson is reading tweets to keep a tally of mentions so it can deliver insights to business, as part of a new partnership between IBM and Twitter.
The Jeopardy-winning powerhouse of a computer has been providing its machine learning and analytics abilities to businesses of all sizes, as IBM continues to claw out of the mire its hardware sales have been sinking the company into.
Watson's insights will help businesses determine how well their products and services are received by consumers, based on language stated in tweets. The supercomputer will also help business predict and adjust to emerging trends in their respective industries.
"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," said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO. "This partnership, drawing on IBM's leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is re-imagining work."
Twitter processes its own analytics and even allows holders of verified accounts to view the information in a dashboard. But the social networking site's decision to defer some of that data interpretation to Watson speaks to the phenomenal powers of a computer that was originally constructed to beat humans at Jeopardy.
"IBM brings a unique combination of cloud-based analytics solutions and a global services team that can help companies utilize this truly unique data," said Chris Moody, vice president of Twitter Data Strategy. "Companies have had successes with Twitter data - from manufacturers more effectively managing inventory to consumer electronic companies doing rapid product development. This partnership with IBM will allow faster innovation across a broader range of use cases at scale."
Reporting on its finances for the third quarter of its 2014 fiscal year, Rometty said she was disappointed in her company's performance and expressed optimism that IBM would find sustainable growth in a new cloud strategy.
With Watson already comfortably cloud-connected, powering apps with insights remotely, IBM's push of the supercomputer's services are one of several big bets the company is making to stay relevant in an industry disrupted by startups every other day.
"Here we are seeing an alignment of old tech and new tech companies. It is the second such deal that IBM has announced in the last couple months. They realize they don't have all the answers and a lot of other companies have asset offerings that can be matched well," said Scott Kessler, analyst at S&P Capital IQ in New York.
