Email wars: Gmail app for Yahoo mail; IBM launches social e-mail

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that the New York-based IBM has its eyes set on beating the California-based Google, and it’s fast roping in partners like Apple and Twitter.

IBM, the multinational technology and consulting corporation, recently unveiled Watson Analytics – a predictive and visual analytics tools a la Google Analytics.

In October, it launched Navigator to boost personal and team productivity by allowing users to easily and securely access, edit and share business documents – a la Google Docs.

And finally, yesterday, it unveiled a business e-mail that integrates social media, file sharing and analytics to learn a user’s behaviour and predict interactions with peers. That’s squarely targeting Gmail.

The company said the new email service, known as IBM Verse, includes a built-in personal assistant called Watson that can learn from a user’s behaviour and draft responses to e-mails based on similar previous interactions.

“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,” it noted in a media announcement.

IBM Verse, it noted, 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, it said.

In an obvious reference to Gmail and its perceived lack of privacy, IBM said that this “intelligent” feature of the IBM Verse “is in contrast to most freely available mail services that mine a user’s inbox to increase advertising and monetise 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.”

In July 2014, IBM launched a partnership with Apple to develop a new class of industry specific business apps to transform enterprise mobility.

“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 said.

The move follows email leader Google Gmail’s latest push wherein its latest Android app supports Yahoo, Outlook and IMAP clients, meaning that it can now help you access its once arch-rival’s email too.

 Since the beginning of November, Gmail 5.0 is available for devices running on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above, but Android Lollipop users will get an additional feature allowing them to hide sensitive lockscreen notifications.

IBM on the other hand has been pushing into the social media domain by tying up with the likes of Twitter. “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,” it said.

These and IBM Verse are intended to help enterprise customers unlock the full potential of professionals and the clients they serve.

A beta release of the new email service will be available to select enterprise clients and partners in November 2014, IBM said. A freemium version delivered via the IBM Cloud Marketplace will be available to individuals in the first quarter of 2015, it added.

Additionally, 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.

IBM is no novice in the email domain, having acquired Lotus Development Corp. in 1995. In fact, according to market-research firm IDC, IBM ranks second to Microsoft Corp. as a provider of email to business customers. Verse will run in a Web browser, and it is being incorporated into apps for smartphones and tablets.

“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.”

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