IBM wants to help businesses better understand their customers, 140 characters at a time. Twitter (TWTR) and IBM (IBM) have announced a new partnership that will grant companies greater access to the data firehose generated by the social media platform. The deal pairs Twitter's data with IBM's analytics that focus on understanding social context on large scales.

This includes IBM's Watson program, which famously beat Jeopardy champions in a special edition of the show. Chris Moody, Twitter's vice president of data strategy, wrote in a blog post that the partnership had been "years in the making," and credited his company's April acquisition of data startup Gnip as providing the capability to pair with IBM. "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," Moody wrote. 

Chris Moody, Twitter's vice president of data strategy, wrote in a blog post that the partnership had been "years in the making," and credited his company's April acquisition of data startup Gnip as providing the capability to pair with IBM.

Read the full story at Mashable.