Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has just announced a new business email service that allows the company to move a step further from delivering electronics to email. Named as “WorkMail”, the launch is being seen as a move to undermine Microsoft’s dominance in office messaging and corporate communication.
If incessant growth of Amazon in cloud computing business was probably not enough to zip the mouth of critics, the launch of WorkMail passes a clear message that Jeff Bezos is not cooling his heals after controlling a lion’s share of the public cloud computing market. The online giant has announced the service as one of the most secure business email services on cloud – a contemporary solution alongside Microsoft Exchange product or Google Gmail and Calendar.
But, WorkMail is not your regular email client, it replace the backend of your business email while still allowing employees to interact via Outlook or any other email client app.
Apparently, WorkMail is more of an extension of other AWS products that provides more of an end-user product experience than it usual cloud computing solution. Its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution, Amazon WorkSpaces, and AWS’s file sharing and synchronization product, Amazon Zocalo, are already in the market to eat into the market of Box or DropBox. The new business email service from Amazon is a kind of bolt-on and extends the offering as a complete product where users can save all kind of its data on cloud.
“Email is no more a simple communication tool, it has evolved as a critical solution for any business to grow. Unlike a decade ago, most of the business decisions and confirmations are happening over the email now. Organizations are considering email as a formally signed document from their clients and vendors. Such developments create a need for a more secured and effective email communication mechanism companies could rely on. Thus the introduction of Amazon WorkMail so soon after Zocalo makes sense. Both the services that integrated with each other, which means a WorkMail user can send a Zocalo-located file within an email workflow”, says Thomas Dohler, General Manager of the Amazon WorkMail team.
According to the recent data, nearly 136 million emails were sent each minute last year. Around 69% of it belonged to business communication category. While we don’t have exact data on how many of these emails were served via cloud business email solution, but the statistics clearly hint at a sizable potential market.
Amazon is targeting enterprise customers who rely on and value their email communication more than anything else. And, why not, eventually they are the high paying customers for all business email solution providers including Microsoft and Google. Therefore, instead of investing its efforts in developing an email client for WorkMail, Amazon preferred to stay focused on email infrastructure and let business users stick to their comfort zone. WorkMail could be integrated with almost every popular email tool – Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 on Windows, Microsoft Outlook 2011 on Mac OS X and all other mobile devices are supported.
Amazon has price-tagged the service with $4 per user per month and offers 50 GB mailbox. If a user wants a bundled solution with Zocalo, it’s available at the price of $6 per user per month for 50 GB email and 200 GB of Zocalo file storage space.
