WorkMail: Amazon’s new service delivers email
Retailer, movie-maker and now email provider – is there any business Amazon doesn’t want to get in on?
The web giant is putting its hat in the ring with the likes of Microsoft and Google to become the go-to email service for companies.
Amazon has revealed WorkMail, an email and calendar service aimed squarely at rivaling Outlook and Gmail in the lucrative corporate arena.
More familiar as a company that delivers books to your door rather than emails to your inbox, Amazon actually does a lot of work behind the scenes through its Web Services division, providing companies with less-than glamorous but business essential services such as web hosting and cloud storage.
A host of firms such as Expedia, Novartis and Airbnb use Amazon’s web services, netting the internet giant $4.3bn last year alone.
Adding email to these services it already offers is a no-brainer – in fact, many of its corporate customers have been asking for it, says Amazon.
“Customers have repeatedly asked us for a business email and calendaring service that is more cost-effective and simpler to manage than their on-premises solution, more secure than the cloud-based offerings available today, and that is backed by the same best-in-class infrastructure platform on which they’re reliably running so many of their current (and future) workloads,” said vice president of Amazon Web Services (AWS) computer services. “We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring.”
Sounds less than exciting, but Amazon adding another tool to its arsenal is another step closer to a future when it rules everything, not just in your home, but your workplace too.
For Amazon, it could give them another $1bn of revenue in their pocket every year, no small number.