IBM announced the launch of a new social email product called IBM Verse. It uses IBM’s analytics technologies to “get to know you,” what you think is important, and key people and groups you interact with.
“And in contrast to most freely available mail services, we don’t mine a user’s inbox to target advertising or monetize that data in other ways,” a spokesperson for the company said in an email. “This is truly about giving every individual an intelligent assistant to organize and prioritize their most important work and relationships.
“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,” they said. “It 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.”
The launch follows partnerships with Apple and Twitter related to enterprise products, aw sell as IBM’s new Watson-powered partner apps and developer tools.
“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 of IBM’s 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.”
Features include intelligent task prioritization, collaboration across devices, and “deep context” around people and teams involved in tasks or products.
IBM Verse will be available in beta to select enterprise clients and partners this months, and a freemium version will be available in early 2015. It will be available for iOS and Android.