With Amazon WorkMail Amazon Enters the Email Provider Space

Move over, Gmail, Google Apps, and Office365, there’s a new email suite kid in town: Amazon WorkMail. With Amazon WorkMail, Amazon moves firmly into the ISP webmail provider space. But only for businesses.

At its heart, Amazon WorkMail is an email and calendaring service. Like competing Google and Microsoft email products, it offers a fully integrated email and calendar system, and like the competing Google and Microsoft products, it offers both a desktop program, and iPhone iOS and Android applications. Moreover, Amazon claims, it works seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, and you can also access all of WorkMail’s offerings with your browser.

WorkMail is also fully integrated with Amazon WorkDocs (nee Amazon Zocalo), Amazon’s answer to DropBox.

So, why?

As Forbes’ Ben Kepes explains, referring to his interview with Amazon General Manager of WorkMail Thomas Döhler, “we have reached the point where email is now a part of the business process – it is not just a simple communication tool but now an integral part of general business processes. It is also the receptacle where much critical business information is stored and controlled. As such it is intrinsically tied into files and data.”

Amazon lists the benefits of Amazon WorkMail as being:

Managed Service

Enterprise-Grade Security

Outlook Compatible

Anywhere Access

Microsoft Active Directory Integration

Low Cost

Amazon WorkMail costs $4.00 per user per month (and so, $4.00 per user mailbox per month – and those mailboxes are limited to 50GB).

50Gigabytes may sound like a lot, but in this day and age of ubiquitous email communications, and images, code, and even videos becoming more commonplace in email, 50GB, while probably adequate for a personal inbox, is likely not sufficient for a serious business user. Then again, it’s also likely that you will be able to buy more storage as an add-on feature.

If you’d like to check it out, you can sign up for a free trial of Amazon Workmail here.

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