IBM is rolling out a new collaboration service that puts an analytic spin on the traditional email formula in a bid to help enterprise workers share information with peers more effectively. Hyped as a reinvention of email itself, the platform is the first fruit of the $100 million investment in user experience that the company revealed in May as part of its ongoing reinvention efforts.

That figure represents only a fraction of billions of dollars that IBM has committed to hig- priority areas of cloud computing and analytics, but it’s a still formidable sum that the vendor has evidently been putting to good use. The newly revealed Verse collaboration platform is intended to be an enterprise-hardened equivalent of Google Inc.’s Inbox.

Like Gmail, Verse is designed with mobile devices in mind, except IBM is making the platform available exclusively for Android and iOS devices, a decision that’s probably influenced by its partnership with Apple to develop industry-specific solutions for mobile users. Verse sports an interface built specifically for this audience that consolidates activities traditionally performed across different tools, including practically everything from calendering to file sharing, under what the IBM describes as a unified view optimized for rapid access.

Hidden behind the sleek look is a machine learning engine that analyzes the behavior of users and optimizes the experience to match the activity patterns of individual workers and teams. Instead of displaying emails in the order of arrival, Big Blue says Verse prioritizes content based on its  importance and provides contextual information around items, such who is contributing to a particular project.

That calibration is performed automatically, but some of the underlying intelligence is exposed directly in the form of social networking features. Specifically, Verse visualizes employee profiles to spare users unnecessary scrolling and maps out the relationships among individuals in an attempt to help streamline collaboration. Even more significantly, future releases are set to incorporate a search feature based on IBM Watson technology that will aim to make it more straightforward to look up specific emails and other items.

Rounding out the app is a collection of higher level project management capabilities designed to help senior members of an enterprise fine-tune task delegation and follow the progress of team members. That not only includes the usual administration and monitoring features but also sharing functionality meant to make communications less prosaic, allowing project managers to publish important updates in the form of aesthetic blog posts instead of bland emails.

Verse is scheduled to launch into beta later this month, with general availability scheduled for the first quarter of 2014. IBM will deliver the service through its SoftLayer cloud on a freemium basis just like Watson Analytics, the previous addition to its burgeoning portfolio.