Amazon Rolls Out Email and Calendaring for Businesses

Amazon.com is launching a web-based corporate email service, ratcheting up its competition with Google and Microsoft.

The company is set to launch WorkMail, an email and calendaring service that will be offered through its Amazon Web Services unit, a spokeswoman said. WorkMail will be offered as part of AWS’s business renting computing storage and services to businesses. Forbes broke the news.

Amazon will launch the product in the second quarter of this year. It will cost $4 per user per month for a mailbox that has 50 gigabytes of storage. If customers bundle it with Zocalo, the AWS file-storage service, it will cost $6 per user per month for 50 gigabytes of mail storage and 200 gigabytes of file storage.

For many companies, email remains a core business process, a place where workers store information as well as plan business strategy. AWS is clearly hoping to tie those functions into its broader offerings.

Amazon is the pioneer in the business of providing infrastructure computing as a service, and continues to lead in that market. But Google and Microsoft are keen to make inroads there, and they are using their position as email providers as a way to target customers interested in shifting more of their computing to the web.

According to Forbes, WorkMail won’t be the application that workers see when they open their mailboxes. Rather, it would serve as the so-called “back-end” technology that would deliver mail and calendaring to a variety of different applications that would run on top of it.

This article appeared in print in the January 29th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.