ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM) today is reinventing enterprise email with a new freemium
social collaboration offering that uses built-in analytics to give
individuals a new way to converse, find the right people and
information fast, and get work done. 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.
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 organizational burdens. 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. Compounding the problem, it is also estimated
that only 14 percent of those emails are of critical
importance. At a time when every organization is striving to
be more efficient, social and collaborative, this has created a
dynamic where the volume of email interaction still outpaces social
collaboration by a wide margin. In fact, 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
20171.
"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. "These forces are reshaping how people make
decisions, create and share new ideas and collaborate across teams
to get work done. 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 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."
Jointly developed in collaboration with more than 50 clients and
partners in the IBM Austin Design Studio and other labs around the
world, the design of IBM Verse incorporates ongoing feedback from a
broad spectrum of business users – from accountants and sales
leaders to marketing professionals and software engineers.
The result was a number of design breakthroughs,
including:
- Intelligent Task Prioritization:
Quickly finds and prioritizes the tasks that matter most. With
lightning-fast search and built-in intelligence, it analyzes – and
eventually even predicts – user behaviors and preferences in order
to personalize an employee's unique social mail experience.
- Intuitive Collaboration Across
Devices: An intuitive, 'at-a-glance' user interface optimized
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.
- Engage People, Not Email: Provides
deep context around the people and teams involved in a given task
or project to drive more valuable employee engagements at the
moment of impact. This allows users to visualize employee profiles,
understand relationships between individuals and teams, and more
effectively track and manage project and task delegation.
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 offering
optimized for mobile and Web environments. 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.
"Simply making the inbox social isn't enough.
Organizations need better tools to support the way real work gets
done in today's modern enterprises," said Charlene Li, founder and CEO of Altimeter
Group. "That means keeping the focus centered on people and
projects, and using analytics and mobile to make it a seamless
experience."
IBM offers the world's deepest portfolio of technologies and
expertise that are transforming the future of work. To help
clients quickly innovate and make better, data-driven decisions,
the company's leading cloud and analytics platforms draw expertise
from 70,000 client engagements and 5,500 patents. To deliver
seamless and secure experiences across devices, clients have access
to 11,000 dedicated mobile and security experts supported by 4,300
patents powering IBM's MobileFirst portfolio. With IBM social
software used by 79 of the top global Fortune 100 companies, IBM
was recently named worldwide market share leader in enterprise
social software for the fifth consecutive year
by IDC2.
For more information on how IBM is transforming the future of
work, visit www.ibm.com/verse.
Read a blog post from one of the creators of IBM Verse, visit
http://ibm.co/1qPynF6.
Editors' Note: Photos are available via the Associated Press
Photo Network and on the Internet at Feature Photo Service's link
through http://www.newscom.com.
Sources:
1 – IDC Technology Spotlight, sponsored by IBM, Improving
Collaboration by Adding Social Capabilities to Email, Jan.
2014
2 – IDC Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks 2014–2018 Forecast and
2013 Vendor Shares, Jul. 23, 2014
Contact:
Kristi Eells
IBM Media Relations
1 (617) 693-1150
keells@us.ibm.com
Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG1qI6MjgIE
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141117/159109
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO
SOURCE IBM