By combining social media, file sharing, and analytics with email, IBM is taking a different approach to business communication. It is launching Verse as a result of its investment in design innovation.
Email is a significant advancement in business productivity but it also causes serious burdens to enterprises when not managed properly. There are around 108 billion work-related emails sent all over the world daily and these require people to check emails about 36 times in one hour on average. To make matters worse, just 14 percent of these emails are actually important. Unfortunately, email remains the top collaborative tool in the market so companies can't do away with it.
IBM understands that bringing together social, mobile, cloud, and analytics technologies impacts personal lives so much that it essentially changes how people work, reshaping the way people make decisions, share ideas, and collaborate to achieve goals.
"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," explains Bob Picciano, IBM Information and Analytics Group senior vice president.
Working in conjunction with over 50 partners and clients in the IBM Austin Studio and other global labs, IBM designed Verse to incorporate ongoing feedback from a range of enterprise users -- from software engineers and marketing professionals to sales leaders and accountants. The result? Design breakthroughs that set Verse apart from other email solutions.
One of the ways Verse stands out is in the way it manages a user's inbox. Where traditional email clients are presented in a chronological list, Verse turns this around by filtering emails based on who sent them and how important these senders are to the recipient. Verse studies user habits to determine which contacts are important but users can also manually set senders to be highlighted so emails from these people will be prioritized.
"The overall design and visual interface immediately caught my attention. 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," shares Gilberto Garcia, Cemex chief technology officer. Cemex is one of IBM's first clients to be involved in the early beta of Verse.
The beta release for Verse is due to come out in November, first made available to select enterprise partners and clients. A freemium version will be released for individual use during the first quarter of 2015 through the IBM Cloud Marketplace. To ensure users can work on-the-go, Verse will also be available as an iOS and Android app.
