AWS Intros Amazon WorkMail Managed Email, Calendaring Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week unveiled Amazon WorkMail, a cloud-based managed business email and calendaring service, that uses Microsoft Exchange. The service adds a new competitor to Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar. It will also be competitive with companies that offer hosted Microsoft Exchange.

Amazon WorkMail enables users “to send and receive email, manage contacts, share calendars and book resources using the same email applications they use today,” according to AWS. It works with any device that supports the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol

It  features built-in support for Microsoft Outlook and mobile email clients, AWS said, and enables users to leverage the AWS Cloud.

“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,” Peter De Santis, vice president of AWS compute services, said in a prepared statement. “We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests.”

Other Amazon WorkMail features include:

“WorkMail was designed to work in today’s data-rich, email-intensive environments,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. “Each inbox has room for up to 50 gigabytes of messages and attachments. Messages can range in size all the way up to 30 megabytes.”

So what does Amazon WorkMail mean for managed service providers (MSPs)? Gigaom Research Senior Analyst Janakiram MSV outlined Amazon WorkMail’s potential impact on MSPs:

“Amazon WorkMail will have an immediate impact on [the] AWS partner ecosystem. After development and test, email is the most common workload to move to the cloud … Once deployed on AWS, APN (Amazon Partner Network) partners with [MSP] competency help customers manage their deployments on AWS. For email-related workloads, they typically charge based on the number of servers and mailboxes they monitor and manage. With WorkMail, the opportunity window for migration and managed services diminishes significantly.”

Amazon WorkMail costs $4 per user per month and includes 50 gigabytes of mailbox storage for each user.

A preview version of Amazon WorkMail is now available, and AWS is offering a 30-day trial of Amazon WorkMail for up to 25 users as well.

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