Amazon WorkMail: A New Hosted Email Player
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Amazon is entering the already rather saturated field of enterprise class email products (Office 365, GMail and Rackspace Email) with their own hosted email product now: Amazon WorkMail.
Amazon WorkMail is $4/user/month putting it squarely in line with Office 365 Hosted Exchange and a few cents below Gmail.
Amazon is taking aim at Google Apps and Office 365 upper level plans with the $2/user/month add on of Amazon WorkDocs as well.
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While it is not to have competition, they are rather late to a game that has been some what dominated by O365, GMail and Rackspace...
However it will be interesting to see how the compare, and how much interest they generate. People know MS for office and email, Amazon has set the market for retail and other options... so not all entirely surprising.
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If there were not three awesome, established players it would be different. But coming in as the fourth player in an established field is tough.
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I understand that Rackspace is pretty big - but I only understand that because of my dealing with this group. I've never heard of Rackspace anywhere else. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are names I hear all over the place. If Amazon advertises this new service, I'd be surprised if they didn't de-seat Rackspace due to name recognition alone.
Note: COLIVER's comment made me realize I was mistaken. I did know about Rackspace, but only in regards to webhosting, not email services. Of course it seems everyone who hosts websites also offers email services, but not on the level to compete with O365.
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@Dashrender said:
I understand that Rackspace is pretty big - but I only understand that because of my dealing with this group. I've never heard of Rackspace anywhere else. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are names I hear all over the place. If Amazon advertises this new service, I'd be surprised if they didn't de-seat Rackspace due to name recognition alone.
I'll have to second this, I knew about Rackspace's cloud computing offerings but didn't realize they had a mail offering until it was mentioned on SW. I have a feeling that Amazon will gain market share quickly just on name recognition.
I wonder if this is their own "dog food"?
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@Dashrender said:
I understand that Rackspace is pretty big - but I only understand that because of my dealing with this group. I've never heard of Rackspace anywhere else. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are names I hear all over the place. If Amazon advertises this new service, I'd be surprised if they didn't de-seat Rackspace due to name recognition alone.
That's odd. Rackspace is one of the big dogs of IT services. They are the backers of some of the biggest things in IT like OpenStack and Cassandra.
Definitely outside of SW, Rackspace is an everyday term. I run into them just as often as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. In the cloud space, Rackspace was really second only to Amazon in terms of market entrance and positioning and, along with Azure, make up the big three cloud providers with Rackspace remaining way more prominent than Azure at the moment.
Rackspace was, before the cloud era, the enormous datacenter provider who did managed servers. That made them the biggest, most important pre-cloud cloud-like company and they still remain the leader in bare metal systems.
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Post people know they provide data center services. But not email. I have had many companies surprised when I mention that they have email.
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@Minion-Queen said:
Post people know they provide data center services. But not email. I have had many companies surprised when I mention that they have email.
Yes, but their cloud is their big product. After Amazon, they are the biggest name is cloud computing. And have been since nearly day one.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Minion-Queen said:
Post people know they provide data center services. But not email. I have had many companies surprised when I mention that they have email.
Yes, but their cloud is their big product. After Amazon, they are the biggest name is cloud computing. And have been since nearly day one.
So cloud is their product, I haven't played in the pool that deals with cloud yet so I haven't been exposed.
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@Dashrender said:
So cloud is their product, I haven't played in the pool that deals with cloud yet so I haven't been exposed.
It's not their classic "we built this company on it" product, but for the past seven or eight years it has been the core of the business. The "metal as a service" business has taken a back seat, but is still a major chunk of revenue.
Rackspace is a huge player in the compute space. These are their big products, roughly in order or scale / market presence / assumed revenue:
- True Cloud Computing via IaaS, and Cloud Object Storage (competes with Amazon S3)
- Metal as a Service Colocation (fully managed colo that makes hardware kind of like cloud, existed before cloud did.)
- Hosted Apps - Email, Web Sites, SharePoint, etc. running on the Rackspace IaaS cloud architecture. Basically their SaaS offerings.
- Jungle Disk - An early Dropbox competitor that lingers on
What Rackspace lacks still, in the cloud space, is a good PaaS offering. But even Amazon has only had that for a few months. Heroku, Joyent and Red Hat are way, way ahead in the PaaS space.
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Rackspace has the absolute best true cloud product for SMB customers (95% of the time.) It is cost effective and flexible and uses OpenStack (it's where it is developed primarily) and Xen, is rock solid, stable and well known. And all open source. But the best part is that they design their system to be user friendly with a low learning curve with lots of accommodations for how SMBs work rather than forcing everyone to be skilled DevOps people with development skills to do the most basic things like Amazon EC2 and Azure require.
If you are an SMB and want to look at cloud, don't look at anyone except Rackspace until you are very comfortable with cloud.
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This could be devastating for Backspace Email. Amazon is such a huge player with so much visibility.
