Verse: IBM's new enterprise email app that integrates social media, analytics

IBM has launched an enterprise email that integrates social media, file sharing and analytics. The email application, called IBM Verse, 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.

With fast search and built-in intelligence, IBM Verse analyses - and eventually even predicts - user behaviours and preferences in order to personalise an employee’s unique social mail experience.

An intuitive, ‘at-a-glance’ user interface optimised for mobile and Web environments helps users quickly take action on content and conversations previously scattered across multiple tools such as email, calendar, to-dos, social networks, chats, online meetings and documents.It features one-click ability to share content as a blog post rather than an email and share files through cloud-based communities.

According to IT industry firm IDC, email remains the single most widely used collaboration tool, with worldwide revenue for enterprise email expected to reach $4.7 billion in 2017.

Delivered on the SoftLayer Cloud with enterprise-grade security, IBM Verse gives enterprise customers, small businesses and individuals a cloud-based social collaboration offering.

IBM Verse enables subject matter experts to share insight in two clicks in any social environment inside or outside their organisation.

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.

“The convergence of analytics, cloud, social and mobile technologies is not just impacting our personal lives, it’s profoundly changing how we work,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, IBM Information and Analytics Group. “With IBM Verse, we challenged our design teams to use analytics to completely reimagine the social collaboration experience to focus on engaging people and driving outcomes, not managing messages and inboxes.”

Cemex, a building materials company, is one of the first clients to participate in an early beta of the new offering.

A beta release of the new offering will be available to select enterprise clients and partners in November 2014. A freemium version delivered via the IBM Cloud Marketplace will be available to individuals in the first quarter of 2015.

IBM Verse will also be offered as an app for both iOS and Android to give mobile users the same experiences on the go as they do on their PCs.