Targets business users.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: In an effort to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft in the corporate market, Amazon is launching an email and calendar service for professionals that will go by the name of WorkMail.
WorkMail would be entering an arena that is already dominated by Microsoft Outlook and Google Apps. The market is a lucrative one. According to the Radicati Group, a market-research firm, cloud-based email services were worth $6.3 billion in annual sales last year and will increase to an estimated $16.9 billion by 2018.
Amazon sees WorkMail as a natural extension of their small but fast-growing Web Services cloud-computing division, which has quickly established itself as a significant source of revenue. Bloomberg reports Amazon Web Services brought in $1.34 billion in the third quarter, an increase 40 percent from the year before.
While Microsoft and Google currently reign supreme in the cloud email sector, “there’s still a big portion of the marketplace that is wary of those vendors for a number of reasons, including security,” T.J. Keitt, a Forrester Research Analyst, told Bloomberg. “There’s a lot of momentum for a company like Amazon to grab on to.”
Amazon is offering a free 30-day trial for WorkMail for as many as 25 users, according to spokeswoman Leah Bibbo. Businesses can subsequently subscribe to the service for $4 a user per month, with 50 gigabytes of cloud storage. A bundled option that includes 200 gigabytes of file storage would cost $6 a user per month, she said.