IBM launches new email service 'Verse'

Tech giant IBM has launched a new e-mail application 'Verse' for enterprises that integrates social media, file sharing and analytics to help increase productivity.

The service stems from IBM's USD 100 million investment in design innovation and adds layers of analytics, social media and security to the application as employees can access emails, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social updates and video chats through a single platform.

It is the first messaging system to feature 'faceted search', which enables users to pinpoint and retrieve specific information they are seeking across all the various types of content within their email.

"With IBM Mail Next, we have 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," IBM Social Business and IBM Smarter Workforce Director Anmol Nautiyal told PTI.

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.

Over time, it can provide instant context about a given project as well as the people and teams collaborating on it.

"Although email is considered one of the most significant advances in workforce productivity over the past 30 years, today it has become one of the greatest organisational burdens," Nautiyal said.

IBM Verse is intended to help enterprise customers unlock the full potential of professionals and the clients, he added.

The company is currently launching the beta version, while a freemium version will be available from the first quarter of next year.

IBM's enterprise mail service, known as Notes, is used by companies worldwide, while more than 50,000 use IBM's social platform for businesses, IBM Connections.

IBM Verse will compete with Microsoft Window's popular Outlook email service and Google's Inbox.

In October, Google had launched an e-mail service 'Inbox' to help organise e-mails and display information like appointments, flight bookings and package deliveries in a more user-friendly way.

IT industry analysts estimate that 108 billion work emails are sent daily, requiring employees to check their inboxes an average of 36 times an hour. Only 14 per cent of those emails are of critical importance.

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

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.