Sheer Poetry in Motion: IBM Launches Verse

Sheer Poetry in Motion: IBM Launches Verse

International Business Machine Corp/IBM has just launched a new email application known as IBM Verse. Big Blue is directly challenging Google and other competitors. IBM hopes its Verse will replace Window’s popular Outlook as the market leader. Initial model of IBM Verse will comprise a limited size mailbox and file sharing capabilities. A paid version with more features and data allowance will be available from January 2015.

This application is part of IBM’s effort to shift the focus to cloud computing and data analytics. Earlier, the company was heavily into hardware services.

Become Well Versed with Verse

IBM Verse has a built in personal assistant that can learn from the behaviour of the user and draft responses to emails relying on previous similar interactions. Users can also try transformation of email content into threads for blogs and social media. The relationship between different employees will be seen in the email along with features such as mute a chain and search through the attachments. The interface of this email pins a user’s most frequent contacts and schedule as well as list of assignments to dashboards for easy and effective access.

IBM’s enterprise mail service called as Notes is currently used by 25,000 businesses worldwide. More than 50,000 use its social platform for businesses, IBM Connections.

Features of Verse

Verse is an email tool which combines analytics, file sharing, telephony, instant messaging and cloud computing plus security in a way never seen before. IBM’s Michael Garbett, VP Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, Asia Pacific has been quoted by Fairfax Media as saying, "We have integrated analytics to help the solution learn about you and your priorities – the system learns over time who you should be paying attention to and what topics should be important to you. You're not just managing a mountain of email – the system is managing it for you and as a result you can bring down the time you spend to a more manageable level.”

Watson’s On The Job

Garbett has also indicated that cognitive computer genius Watson will be helping Verse to know what it must learn. IBM’s software tools will work to make the product unique, says Garbett who also remarked, "Verse is basically the next iteration of those capabilities in the cloud – not just another set of integrated collaboration tools.” IBM and Apple will be collaborating with each other for integration of this email service with the latter’s products. Verse will also be available on Android and Window devices.

Verse will be able to locate whatever the user is searching for, from email archives to chat sessions, wiki entries, blogs or documents. It may even be able to re-route phone calls with a little bit of rule setting. From Google’s Wave to Microsoft’s Yammer and Salesforce Chatter, companies have always been on a lookout for eliminating email.

Reinventing enterprise email, IBM is providing users built in analytics to give them a new voice and help them to join in the conversation. IBM Verse emerges from the USD 100 million investment in design innovation and brings together leading cloud, analytics, social and security platforms to transform workplaces across the world.