Amazon's enterprise email and calendaring product WorkMail is now generally available, and it's entering quite a crowded, competitive field dominated by Microsoft and Google. Along with the many other email applications available, it's a fair question to ask where WorkMail can gain traction. First, here are the key details of the new cloud service's capabilities, from a blog post by Amazon's Jeff Barr:
I am happy to be able to announce that Amazon WorkMail is now generally available in three AWS regions (US East (Northern Virginia),US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland)).
We continued to add features to Amazon WorkMail during the preview, with a focus on security, ease of use, and migration. Here’s a summary:
Integration with KMS – You (the email administrator) can use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to create and manage the keys that are used to encrypt data at rest.
Certifications – Amazon WorkMail has achieved the ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications. You can learn more about these certifications on the AWS Cloud Compliance page.
Regional Data Control – You can choose the region where you want to store your mailboxes and be confident that the stored data will not leave the region. For more information, take a look at Amazon WorkMail Regions and Endpoints.
Easy Setup – By using Amazon WorkMail in conjunction with Simple AD, you can be up and running with a modest number of clicks, generally in 10 minutes or less. Read Getting Set Up to learn more.
Additional Client Support – Amazon WorkMail now supports clients that run on OS X, including Apple Mail and Outlook. It also supports clients that use the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol including iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Fire Phone, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry 10.
Other features added during the beta include a migration tool for moving other mailboxes over to WorkMail. In the development stages now is interoperability support to provide WorkMail users with a single global address book, as well as an email journaling feature that customers can use to save WorkMail content with their current email archiving tool.
WorkMail is priced at $4 per user per month with 50GB of storage, the same as Microsoft's entry-level Exchange Online service. But for $5 per user per month, Microsoft and Google offer entry-level versions of Office 365 and Google Apps, both of which include many more features than WorkMail, such as videoconferencing.
Overall, WorkMail may be facing an uphill battle, according to Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky.
"The short take on it is, the world's dominated by Gmail and Exchange—what does it need with another email system?" he says. "Cynicism aside, what they can offer is the breadth of the amazon data centers for companies that are very very concerned about data residency." Amazon may be able to convince customers it has an edge here, although given the aggressive data center rollout plans all major vendors are conducting, it's not clear for how long.
There's another group of customers who might find WorkMail appealing, namely those invested heavily in Amazon Web Services for building applications. "It might make sense for them to messaging, emailing and filesharing from that same vendor," Lepofsky says. What would be good to see soon is a marquee reference customer for WorkMail, he adds.
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