In its bid to reinvent the enterprise email, global IT major IBM has unveiled its cloud driven social mail software, ‘IBM Verse’. It uses built-in analytics to give employees a new way to converse, find the right people and information fast, and contribute towards increasing their productivity.
IBM Verse stems from the company’s $100 million investment in design innovation and brings together its leading cloud, analytics, social and security platforms to transform the future of work.
IBM Verse takes a vastly different approach to enterprise email by integrating the many ways employees connect each day – via email, meetings, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social updates, video chats and more – through a single collaboration environment. It is the first messaging system to feature ‘faceted search,’ which enables users to pinpoint and retrieve specific information they’re seeking across all the various types of content within their email.
IBM Verse uses built-in analytics to provide an ‘at-a-glance’ view that intelligently surfaces an individual’s most critical actions for the day. By learning unique employee preferences and priorities over time, it provides instant context about a given project as well as the people and teams collaborating on it. This is in contrast to most freely available mail services that mine a user’s inbox to increase advertising and monetize that data in other ways – an unwelcome proposition for business users concerned about privacy or which operate in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
Clients using IBM Verse will also have the future option to embed a Watson feature into their collaboration environment, which enables users to query Watson on a given topic and receive a direct reply with answers ranked by degree of confidence.
Today’s launch expands upon recent IBM initiatives designed to help organizations change the way people work, industries operate and companies perform. In July 2014, IBM launched a partnership with Apple to develop a new class of industry specific business apps to transform enterprise mobility. In September, IBM unveiled Watson Analytics to put powerful yet easy-to-use predictive and visual analytics tools in the palm of your hand, and in October launched Navigator to boost personal and team productivity by allowing users to easily and securely access, edit and share business documents. Most recently, the company formed a global partnership with Twitter to transform how businesses understand customers, markets and trends by using Twitter data to make more informed decisions. These and IBM Verse are intended to help enterprise customers unlock the full potential of professionals and the clients they serve.
“The convergence of analytics, cloud, social and mobile technologies is having a profound impact on our personal lives but also in the way we work as professionals,” said Anmol Nautiyal, Director- IBM Social Business & IBM Smarter Workforce. “These forces are reshaping how we make decisions, create and share new ideas and collaborate across teams to get work done. With IBM Mail Next, we’ve applied analytics to enterprise email in a very unique way, and challenged our design teams to completely re-imagine the social collaboration experience with focus on engaging people and driving outcomes, not managing messages and inboxes.”
Cemex, a global leader in the building materials industry, is one of the first clients to participate in an early beta of the new offering.
“The overall design and visual interface immediately caught my attention, there is a simplicity and purpose in how information is presented that makes the entire experience very intuitive,” said Gilberto Garcia, Chief Technology Officer, Cemex. “I quickly realized just how much was happening beneath the surface. It gives you a seamless blend of email, social and collaboration capabilities that didn’t force me to jump between my inbox, calendar and other apps to share and connect with people. It’s hard to even call this email anymore, that’s just one facet to what they are delivering with IBM Verse.”
IBM Verse enables subject matter experts to share insight in two clicks or less in any social environment inside or outside their organization. Rather than replying to a narrow email distribution, project leaders can share their insights as a blog post for their entire project team, with the ability to delegate and track critical actions across individual team members.
Delivered on the SoftLayer Cloud with enterprise-grade security, IBM Verse gives enterprise customers, small businesses and individuals a scalable, cloud-based social collaboration environment optimized for mobile and Web environments. A beta release of the new offering will be available to select clients and partners in November 2014. A freemium version delivered via the IBM Cloud Marketplace will be available in the first quarter of 2015. IBM Verse will also be offered as an app for both iOS and Android to ensure mobile users have the same experiences on the go as they do on their PCs.
