IBM's New Online Email Service

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Nov 21, 2014

In our last article about International Business Machines (IBM, Financial) titled: ‘IBM: Hold For Long-Term Gains’ we had illustrated why we felt that the stakes in the company was a strong hold, a postulate we still strongly support and advocate. IBM has just launched a new online email service which is targeted at corporate clients and comes with features suited to the requirements of travelling professionals. Let us take a deeper look into the new service.

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IBM’s versatility in the making of Verse

IBM will soon launch a new online email service called Verse, and it puts a new spin on this very old idea.

Set to go live sometime in the next week, Verse aims at changing the look and feel of emails. IBM is looking to usher in the new way of emailing. The new email system would be organized not according to the conventional timeline, but will focus on the person who sent it; a structure which is highly relevant to a corporate set-up. In a corporate or professional setup, the sender is more important than the time chronology. Mail from a client or boss may carry more weightage than one sent by a colleague or a junior. The online client—pictured above—uses images of your most frequent contacts to provide a rather visual representation of where emails are coming from and where they’re going.

According to Carolyn Pampino, IBM’s director of design who is spearheading Verse said, “Verse is an answer to a long-running problem. Email clients have been around since the ’70s but they haven’t changed much,” she says. “You get a flat list of emails that you have to triage, with no sense of where or whom you need to focus on.”

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IBM is launching Verse with the intent to engineer the whole emailing system from what it is currently to a more focused and purpose-driven communication system, rendering more meaning to the official emails that we currently send.

Companies across the globe have been putting in their efforts to work out on these lines which have given birth to tools like Evernote to Asana and Slack. The race to perfect email systems is not just limited to IBM but companies likeAcompli, Baydin, and one of the biggest names Google (GOOG, Financial) has been investing in this direction but not many have reached any point of success.

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With its tool, Inbox, Google focuses on automatically sorting your email into different categories based on what type of message it is. For example, it categorizes the received emails into primary, social, promotions, updates and so on and so forth. This is a good option in open emailing system but when it comes to corporate hierarchy the focus on the sender is of more importance than the categorization of types of emails. With Verse, IBM is also hoping to redesign the old organizational structures and address the requirement of corporate emailing.

Pictorial Display

A task bar at the top of the Verse service displays a picture of each of your most important contacts. When you receive a new message from one of them, a little red dot appears on their picture icon in the bar. You can then just click on their picture icon to see their latest messages.

The whole purpose is to focus on the sender and not on the chronology or the subject line thus allowing you to prioritize the message from your boss over the one from your friend even though the message from your friend is the latest one. Verse tries to algorithmically determine who the most important contacts are based on your correspondence history, but you can also add them manually.

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IBM is trying to make the email organization more people-centric than the current systems though there is option of turning the feature of and switch to the traditional email format for user who prefer to go by the existing format. Unlike other new email clients, IBM wants Verse to be a kind of collaboration platform that solves many of the same problems that companies like Asana and other “email killers” are trying to solve.

More than just Email

IBM has also added a file sharing property to the new email service. Somewhat like Dropbox, where you can upload your files to the service and then share links to the files instead of sending them as attachments, reduces the data size of emails being sent. Often in a corporate setup there are data limitations commonly fixed as 25MB and when you want to attach and send a presentation exceeding the data limit, you are left frustrated of mail delivery failure messages. Now with the link sharing property this is taken care of. You can also add notes to the files from within Verse to avoid unnecessary email back and forth to clarify points.

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IBM has also decorated the Verse in great details to suit corporate needs. Verse comes with an inbuilt calendar and task manager as well. Like one of the most popular email tool, Microsoft Outlook, it aims to merge email with a vast range of activity that helps you balance your online life without much brainstorming.

Bottom-line

The obvious question is whether it’s too late for IBM to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft (MSFT, Financial), who now dominates the internet email application domain. The answer is IBM is not just trying to add another emailing tool in the marketplace, but offering to revamp the whole emailing system. Since it is more suited for corporate email solutions, IBM is trying to entice the corporates into a B2B tie-up, something IBM is best known for since its inception.

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This looks to be a real big step in the process of innovative technology which has been the USP of the IT juggernaut and will certainly boost its current market position which looks to be in a slump for some time. We would like to reiterate ourselves in recommending IBM to be a strong hold and adding positions in the company. Since this is just the start of a new era of innovative technical solutions from the IBM deck and a lot more is about to follow in the near term that will leverage the position of the business as a whole. For now, it would be best to observe the market response after Verse is launched.