Twitter partners with IBM to let enterprises leverage its social data for making complex decisions

Twitter announced a partnership with IBM today to help big businesses pull better insights from social data.

The deal follows Twitter’s acquisition of social media firehose provider Gnip earlier this year.

While companies have long listened to what their customers are saying on Twitter, complex enterprise decisions often require input from a lot of different systems,” Chris Moody, vice president of Twitter’s data strategy, and formerly Gnip’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post on the partnership today. “IBM’s expertise is in integrating complex systems and data to make better decisions.”

As a result of the deal, consultants affiliated with IBM Global Business Services business unit will learn about how Twitter data can come in handy for business applications, Moody wrote. On top of that, Big Blue will work to bolster its analytics software with data from Twitter.

“This announcement has been years in the making,” Moody wrote.