Amazon Web Services Gets Simple Email Service

Amazon Web Services is mostly known for their cloud infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. But now AWS is broadening its horizons with the launch of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), an offering designed to provide cheap, scalable bulk and transactional messaging for developers and businesses alike. Amazon SES can potentially eliminate the need for on-premises bulk marketing e-mail systems and compete with cloud-delivered ones.

The idea is that, much like other Amazon Web Services offerings, Amazon SES customers only pay for the cloud resources they use. So rather than buy or build a costly on-premises marketing e-mail system, AWS is letting users do it on their infrastructure for as little as $.10 per thousand sent messages, according to the press release. It’s price-competitive with similar cloud-based offerings like those from Mailchimp, and doesn’t require a contract.

On the technology side of things, Amazon Simple Email Service is designed to integrate with the Amazon EC2 compute platform via API, meaning cloud applications can easily be enabled to send huge masses of e-mail. And if the messages originate from Amazon EC2, users get two thousand a day for free.

That could be a boon for MSPs, VARs, and cloud service providers who need to do marketing for themselves or on behalf of their clients. And content filtering ensures that the outgoing messages meet ISP standards so they don’t get blocked going out the exit. If a message does bounce, Amazon SES will provide a log.

The optimistic view holds that Amazon SES is a mature product and a good value-add for cloud service providers. But the pessimist in me wonders if it’s a scramble for new revenue sources ahead of shrinking cloud margins.

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