A new cloud and social media partnership has been announced between IBM (News - Alert) and Hootsuite with the goal of offering Hootsuite customers a quick and reliable social experience. Hootsuite will be using IBM’s cloud IaaS offering, SoftLayer (News - Alert), to house its popular App Directory through the partnership.

Hootsuite’s App Directory is a repository of extensions and apps that business users may add to their Hootsuite dashboard to create customer views of their favorite metrics and social outlets. The migration to SoftLayer enables stability and scalability so Hootsuite can offer their customers dedicated infrastructure. The partnership will also give users a toolkit for provisioning and management to make App Directory easier to use.

"IBM Cloud offers high performance, granular control and flexibility,” said Aaron Budge, vice president of operations and IT at Hootsuite. “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."

The partnership builds on the companies’ two-year relationship with plans to integrate additional applications in the future. That includes an upcoming university program that will bring together IBM’s Academic Initiative and Hootsuite’s Higher Education Program to combine analytics and cloud training with professional social media skills. Classrooms participating in the IBM Academic Initiative will also be able to access Hootsuite’s Higher Education Program through the partnership.

IBM is also planning to use Hootsuite to socially promote more than two dozen hackathons the company has planned for next year. The series of hackathons will reach 10,000 developers, designers and entrepreneurs throughout the world, and will showcase the Bluemix and Watson technologies.

The planned collaborations follow Hootsuite’s recent integration of IBM Silverpop (News - Alert) into its App Directory. That move lets social media managers and marketers access insights on the behavior of those interacting with their brands through social media networks. Hootsuite also integrated IBM Connections with the App Directory, letting users combine internal and external social behaviors through a single app.