Amazon has just announced that it would be launching a new cloud-based calendaring and email service called Amazon WorkMail. By doing this Amazon takes on Microsoft’s Office.
Amazon is best known as an online reseller and the manufacturer of the world’s most popular e-book reader, the Kindle, but now the tech giant is dipping its toes into the webmail service with its new Amazon WorkMail.
Amazon WorkMail won’t be competing with Google’s Gmail or Yahoo’s Yahoo Mail because it will be focused strictly on workplace email, which means that Microsoft’s Office and Google Apps for Work will be its direct competitors.
If you are interested in getting an Amazon WorkMail account, then you should know that the service will cost $4 per inbox and it includes 50GB of storage per user.
The big advantage of Amazon WorkMail is its availability. Companies won’t need to invest their money on email servers, software and support, as everything is going to be handled by Amazon. Amazon will also help encrypt emails to strengthen security for work emails.
Amazon said that Amazon WorkMail users are going to be able to send and receive emails, share calendars, manage contacts and book resources using their email applications, such as Microsoft Outlook or iOS and Android Web browser email apps.
Peter De Santis, VP of AWS Compute Services, released a statement in which he revealed the reasons behind Amazon WorkMail. He said that customers had been asking for a business email for some time and that:
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.
Even though social media has been gaining a lot of popularity in the past few years, traditional email is still very popular and very much utilized, say analysts. That fact will not change any time soon, say the Radicati Group, a tech research firm. The tech research company has estimated that the majority of email traffic last year was generated by business users. They revealed that a whopping 108.7 billion email were received and sent every day. In 2014, the company estimated by business users, on average, sent and received around 120 emails every day and that number is going to grow to 140 emails by 2018.
Image Source: Amazon
