Amazon gets into hosted email with WorkMail
Joining the hotly contested hosted email solution market, Amazon is taking on the likes of Gmail for businesses and Office 365 with a new service called WorkMail. There are a few differences to its rival products; for a start, WorkMail allows businesses to choose on which set of Amazon AWS servers their data lies, which will help keep them within their jurisdiction and stay compliant with local data privacy laws. Something that may or may not be an advantage, depending on the level of enterprise security, is that WorkMail lets businesses manage their own sets of encryption keys.
The product is available now across the US and Europe, and is likely to roll out globally soon. This expansion will also help to cut transfer times. WorkMail costs $4 per user per month (pupm), or can be bundled with WorkDocs for document sharing and a collaboration suite for $6 pupm. It can sync with anything that uses ActiveSync, including Outlook on PCs. While Amazon may be dominating in cloud computing services, it is falling behind in adoption by enterprises for the routine tasks of business – especially when it comes to smaller businesses. So WorkMail and WorkDocs are part of a concerted effort to get those users interested in AWS, S3 and EC2, where Amazon has so much power and can offer opportunities for companies to exploit.
The trouble is that users are now happy with vibrant and full-spectrum products, like Google Docs, Outlook, OneDrive and Office 365, which all leave Amazon’s barebones and piecemeal approach looking rather hollow. We’ll find out in coming quarters just how much AWS makes for Amazon, as the company changes its reporting methods, but it is hard to see WorkMail adding more than pocket change to the numbers.
Does WorkMail sound like an option for your business, or are you already happy with your current product and unlikely to move unless there is an obvious and significant advantage? We wonder what Amazon will offer next to attract customers, but we think there’s an uphill battle ahead.
