For the past decade, email has been perpetually a year away from becoming obsolete. But email is far from dead. Instead, business and personal communications is evolving beyond our inboxes with no shortage of new attempts to build a better email mouse trap. The latest attempts come from two notable companies IBM and Facebook.

Increasingly, employees rely on freemium social media tools for business and personal communication at work from Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, SMS, and IM. But these communication tools come with security risks, liabilities, and compliance issues. These communication services are not designed for professional use and create more problems than solutions. Audit trails gets scattered across services and stranded on devices instead of being centrally stored and synced.

That’s why businesses have turned to solutions such as Salesforce.com's Chatter or Yammer that package text and video chat, centralized posting, commenting, and email-like messaging. There are also project management tools such as Basecamp that offer similar functionality plus added features such as calendaring and to-do lists. But despite the myriad of solutions crowding the corporate communication market, statistics reveal we are actually becoming more reliant on email and its stranglehold on us tightening.

According to market research firm Radicati Group, while the deluge of personal email is slowing down in 2014, business email traffic is headed in the other direction.

·         Today, the business world accounts for over 108.7 billion sent and received per day, and by 2018 that number will be 139.4 billion.

·         Radicati reports individual business email users in 2014 sent and received on average 121 emails a day, a number expected to grow to 140 emails by 2018.

·         In the consumer space, social networking will grow from about 3.6 billion accounts in 2014 to over 5.2 billion accounts by the end of 2018.

“Email remains the most pervasive form of communication in the business world, while other technologies such as social networking, instant messaging (IM), mobile IM, and others are also taking hold, email remains the most ubiquitous form of business communication,” wrote Sara Radicati, CEO of the Radicati Group.

With no success, Google tried to free us from our Outlook dependency with its ill-fated Wave communication tool that attempted to blur the line between social networks and email. The service was a flop and Google shut it down. But that hasn’t stopped big names from trying again to make email more efficient.

Next month IBM enters the fray. It has enlisted the help of its Jeopardy-winning Watson supercomputer to help make email more efficient with a service called Verse.

Verse is IBM’s attempt to de-clutter the inbox with a web-based messaging solution that brings together messaging, social collaboration, analytics with web and mobile access into a single collaboration environment, wrote Carolyn Pampino, design director of IBM’s Collaboration Solutions, in a product description. Verse, which was originally announced late last year becomes available on a trial basis in March.

“As the research began, the team asked the question, ‘What is the real problem to solve?’ The answer became apparent: Corporate mail users were a captive audience suffering with antiquated tools. We started with the in-box because it’s perhaps the greatest source of pain, and it’s familiar to everyone in the workplace,” Pampino wrote.

Here are the three cornerstones of Verse.

·         First, it’s a system that attempts to “know” the user. “By quickly finding and prioritizing the tasks that matter most, the built-in intelligence analyzes users’ behaviors and preferences to personalize — and eventually predict — an employee’s social mail experience.”

·         Second, Verse attempts to de-clutter messaging by delivering “clarity” by offering a streamlined at-a-glance dashboard that weaves together conversations spread across your email inbox, calendar, to-do lists, social networks, chat sessions, online meetings and documents.

·         Lastly, Verse builds context around the people and teams of people you communicate the most with.

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