Amazon challenges Outlook, Google Apps with WorkMail

On Monday, Amazon (AMZN) announced the general availability of WorkMail, the company’s cloud-based email and calendar platform, with the addition of several new features.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will be launching services for its fifth Asia-Pacific region in Seoul, South Korea, with two datacentres featuring redundant power, enabling customers to run high-latency and scalable applications in a more fault-tolerant environment.

Local independent software vendors, including Dreamline, TMAXSoft, IGAWorks, Ahnlab, and Hancom are also working alongside AWS to provide integrated solutions for software, security, and connectivity. Since its launch locally in May 2015, over 1,000 Korean students are participating in AWS-related classes and non-profit e-learning programs, such as “Like a Lion”. “AWS has the most mature, experienced platform”. Another new AWS region will be activated in the U.S.in OH, bring to four the total AWS regions to be opened in 2016 – a record expansion. “With the launch of the AWS Region on Korean soil, we will now move even more of our sensitive and mission-critical workloads to AWS”.

Although Amazon promises that WorkMail is easy to set up and support, I forecast some problems in getting customers to accept that WorkMail is a real contender in the enterprise messaging market.

The $4 per user per month service comes with an allocation of 50GB of storage and will be run from AWS’ US data centres in Northern Virginia and OR (in the US), with a single data centre in Eire to service European customers. It’s a managed cloud email and calendaring product that works with existing desktop and mobile clients.

The service also gives users the option to stipulate which AWS datacentre or region they want their mailboxes to be stored in for data sovereignty reasons, and it can also be used to process meeting room or conference equipment booking requests.

WorkMail will support clients running on OS X, including Apple Mail and Outlook. WorkMail integrates with the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol including Android, Blackberry 10, Fire Phone (does anyone actually use one?), iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Windows Phone.