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Continuing on its strategy of striking up high-powered partnerships with its IBM Cloud, IBM today announced plans to team up with Hootsuite to integrate several of their cloud and social technologies.
Under the partnership, Hootsuite will migrate its popular App Directory to IBM Cloud’s infrastructure as a service, SoftLayer.
App Directory is a collection of extensions and applications that business professionals add to their Hootsuite dashboard to create custom views of the social outlets and metrics most important to them. By running App Directory on the IBM Cloud, Hootsuite will be able to provide clients with a scalable infrastructure with an easy-to-use toolkit for provisioning and management.
“IBM Cloud offers high performance, granular control and flexibility,” said Aaron Budge, vice president of operations and IT at Hootsuite, in a statement. “When you couple that with its globally integrated footprint, we will have the ability to move data between data centers efficiently which will provide resiliency, flexibility and control. We have had a great relationship with IBM for more than two years and are expanding our relationship with new product integrations and the ability to leverage IBM technology.”
In addition, IBM Cloud provides data resiliency, data privacy and data localization. And Hootsuite can rapidly roll out new features and functions to customers.
IBM and Hootsuite also will be partnering on an upcoming university program that pairs IBM’s Academic Initiative with Hootsuite’s Higher Education Program, bringing analytics and cloud training together with professional social media skill development. As part of the program, classrooms enrolled in IBM’s Academic Initiative will have access to Hootsuite’s Higher Education Program, which provides professors and their students with three months of free access to Hootsuite’s social media education resources and courseware. To date, Hootsuite has made an impact in more than 300 universities with its Higher Education Program.
The IBM Academic Initiative is a no-charge program that provides more than 8,000 university faculty members access to technology and expertise. Faculty members receive 12 months of access to a Bluemix trial for their use and up to six months of access for students. Bluemix is IBM’s platform as a service. Both faculty and student accounts are renewable and do not require a credit card.
By combining IBM Cloud technology with Hootsuite’s social media solutions, students will be able to increase their technical skills as well as their social media expertise.
“The partnership between IBM and Hootsuite will blend analytics and social technologies to provide students and professionals the skills they need for social marketing,” said Randy Hlavac, a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a member of IBM’s Academic Initiative, in a statement. “Utilizing IBM Cloud and Analytic solutions, students are able to gain deep market knowledge. The Hootsuite tools will utilize this insight and allow students to test messaging immediately and deliver the most engaging content globally.”
The migration of App Directory to IBM Cloud and the joint university program are the latest collaborative efforts between IBM and Hootsuite. Recently, Hootsuite integrated IBM Silverpop into App Directory, enabling marketers and social media managers to gain insights into the behavior of individuals who interact with their brand through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. This complements the existing integration into IBM Connections, enabling users to mix internal and external social behavior, IBM said.
IBM, Hootsuite Partner on Cloud, Social Integration
IBM also will use Hootsuite exclusively to socially promote more than two dozen hackathons in 2016, as part of the Eighth Global Hackathon Series to take place globally throughout the year. The series will reach 10,000 developers. These events will showcase IBM’s Bluemix and Watson technologies.
“IBM and Hootsuite continue to work together to drive the integration of social and cloud to empower clients with the ability to make data-driven decisions quickly and easily,” said Sandy Carter, general manager of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM, in a statement.
Hootsuite will move its App Directory to IBM Cloud in the fourth quarter of 2015.
In other key IBM Cloud partnerships, at the IBM Insight 2014 conference last October in Las Vegas, IBM and Twitter announced a landmark partnership to help transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends—and inform every business decision. The alliance brings together Twitter data that represents the public pulse of the planet with IBM’s cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms and consulting services.
IBM offers Twitter data as part of select cloud-based services, including IBM Watson Analytics, IBM’s cognitive service that brings intuitive visualization and predictive capabilities to business users; and a cloud-based data refinery service that enables application developers to embed data services in applications. Developers also are able to integrate Twitter data into new cloud services they are building with IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or Bluemix.
In March of this year, IBM and Twitter announced several new cloud-data services to help businesses more efficiently listen to consumer Twitter conversations to identify insights and to make better business decisions. By merging Twitter data with Watson Analytics, users can more easily identify and explain hidden patterns and relationships, the companies said. The IBM and Twitter partnership aims to help enterprise clients apply social data to business decisions. More than 100 customers are using the software in early engagements.
In May, IBM announced a partnership with Facebook to help marketers change how they interact with consumers and improve consumers’ overall experience with brands on social networks, on their mobile devices or even in-store. Facebook and IBM Commerce said they would collaborate to provide the world’s leading brands with tailored marketing capabilities that reach the right people at the right time with the right message.
“Brands understand the increasing need to provide customers with powerful and personalized experiences to nurture loyalty,” said Deepak Advani, general manager of IBM Commerce, in a statement. “Through this collaboration, consumer product companies and retailers will be able to quickly and easily gain deeper insight into what their customers expect and provide them with compelling experiences that bridge the physical and virtual divide.”