Amazon launching cloud-based email and calendar service

Amazon has announced plans to offer cloud-based email and calendar service. It has been dubbed Amazon WorkMail.

The service “enables users to send and receive email, manage contacts, share calendars, and book resources using the same email applications they use today” such as Outlook and services like Google Apps.

The service targets corporate customers who are currently paying for services including Outlook.

The service will be offered via its cloud unit Amazon Web Services. It will cost $4 per user per month and comes with 50GB of mailbox storage. It can also come bundled with Amazon WorkDocs.

According to a statement by Amazon:

The service “is fully compatible with Microsoft Outlook, and customers can quickly integrate Amazon WorkMail with their existing corporate directory, choose encryption keys, select the location where they want their data to reside, and pay only for the mailboxes they create,”

Peter De Santis, vice president at Amazon Web Services, said:

“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 on which they’re reliably running so many of their current (and future) workloads,”

“We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings.”