IBM today announced the availability of IBM Verse, an innovative new social messaging solution that incorporates built-in analytics to give people a new way to connect, communicate and find the right people and information fast.

A direct result of IBM’s $100 million investment in design innovation, IBM Verse integrates email, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social and more – all through a single collaborative, cloud-based environment.

Woven throughout the solution is analytics that intelligently and automatically surface users’ most important people and critical actions to focus on for the day. By learning unique user preferences and priorities over time, IBM Verse provides instant context on people and teams.

“IBM Verse is a natural blending of IBM’s expertise in collaboration and analytics,” said Jens Rauschen, Managing Director of Retail, Hamm-RENO Group, GmbH, one of Europe’s largest footwear retailers which has been beta testing the solution. “It understands who and what is important to me and helps me get to the heart of the most important matters quickly, so I can get back to my business.”

“One of the few things that have changed with email over the past 30 years is the amount of messages being sent and received,” said Jeff Schick, General Manager, Enterprise Social Solutions. “Businesses are sending upwards of 108 billion emails a day and people just can’t keep up. Verse combines things like email, calendaring and file sharing with analytics to provide a system that learns who and what are most important to you.”

For international marketing and communications firm, Havas Creative, design and speed are key aspects of the solution. “Right away, I was impressed with how intuitive, user-friendly, and modern Verse is,” said Jeff Marshall, CIO Havas Creative North America. Havas Creative manages an IBM Verse beta environment and plans to roll it out to more than 5,000 employees across North America, Latin America and Asia-Pacific this year.

Of particular interest to Marshall is IBM Verse’s faceted search. With faceted search, users can pinpoint and retrieve specific information across all the various types of content within their email extremely quickly.

Other key features of IBM Verse include:

  • Team Analytics. With just one click, users can see an organizational graph of the people on their thread and gain insights before responding. No longer do you have to wonder who you are corresponding with.
  • Calendaring. As part of Verse’s innovative visual design the calendar is animated, visible and actionable across the bottom of the landing page, making missed meetings a thing of the past. Users can join meetings quickly by merely hovering over the calendar meeting and clicking “Join Meeting” directly from the calendar bar.
  • File Sharing: IBM Verse includes a social file sharing capability to make co-editing, review and commenting on a file easy. When sending an email, users can choose to easily upload a file from their desktop and share it with the mail recipients in a single action. This enables full life cycle management of the files. In addition, owners can track who has downloaded the file and recipients will always have access to the latest version instead of the version that was attached into the email. It is safe, secure and encrypted. These files can be synchronized to users’ desktops, and mobile devices, making sharing and action easy, tractable and also saving space.

Delivered on the SoftLayer Cloud with enterprise-grade security, IBM Verse offers organizations big or small a scalable, cloud-based social collaboration offering. In addition, IBM plans to introduce a new licensing model as part of its Bridge to Cloud program for IBM Connections Cloud that makes it easy for customers to deploy collaboration solutions to cloud, on premises or in a hybrid environment.

IBM plans to offer new native mobile apps for Verse that integrate with the IBM MobileFirst platform, including IBM MobileProtect, and starting with IBM iOS for iPhone later this month. IBM will follow that release with apps for Android and iPad in the second quarter.