IBM And Twitter Just Announced A Huge New Partnership

IBM and Twitter just announced a new partnership, something along the same lines as IBM's partnership with Apple.

IBM is going to help businesses use Twitter data to help them understand their customers, businesses and other trends.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty worked "personally" together on the deal, Rometty said in an IBM conference that announced the deal.

There are three parts to the partnership.

1. Twitter data will be integrated into IBM's big data analytics tools like Watson Analytics. And it will be added to IBM's BlueMix, its cloud that hosts apps. This will allow developers to write enterprise apps that include Twitter data, and will allow businesses to include Twitter data when analyzing their business.

2. IBM will be developing new apps for the enterprise that make use of Twitter data. The first one is an app that helps companies better engage their customers over Twitter, Rometty said on Wednesday.

3. IBM will also be training 10,000 consultants to write custom enterprise apps that use Twitter data.

More to come.