Today Amazon launches its corporate email and calendar service called WorkMail to take on Microsoft and Google, Forbes contributor Ben Kepes reports. CEO of Amazon quotes that:
Customers are not happy with their current email solution,” Adam Selipsky, an executive with Amazon Web Services, told the Wall Street Journal. “A lot of customers feel those solutions are expensive and complex.
WorkMail can be seen as an extension of a couple of recent AWS products that have had much more of an “end user” feel than its usual cloud computing solutions. Amazon WorkSpaces, a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution and Amazon Zocalo, AWS’ file sharing and synchronization product aimed squarely at competing with Box or Dropbox, are both much more mass market than other AWS products. WorkMail takes these and extends them further. I spent time talking with Thomas Döhler, General Manager of the Amazon WorkMail team, about the rationale for the product and what it does.
AWS is pushing Amazon WorkMail as a secure solution. Leveraging the company’s Key Management Service (KMS), WorkMail data can be encrypted with customer-managed keys. In the event that customer-supplied keys are not being used, WorkMail data is encrypted by KMS with an AWS-supplied key. AWS is also delivering on organizations’ demands for specificity around the location of their data – users can specify where their Amazon WorkMail data will be stored – both for lower latency and regional compliance reasons. At this stage an organization can only chose one location, rather than splitting users’ WorkMail data dependent on location, but that additional feature is likely to be added over time.
In terms of pricing, Amazon WorkMail costs $4 per user per month for a 50GB mailbox. Bundled with Zocalo it is priced at $6 per user per month for 50GB of mail and 200GB of Zocalo file storage. The product is slated to launch in Q2 of 2015.
Source: BusinessInsider and Forbs
