Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) to provide businesses with large-scale bulk e-mail messaging in the cloud.
Amazon Web
Services Jan. 25 launched a bulk e-mail service for businesses and developers,
providing a messaging option for the cloud-computing provider's arsenal of
Web-based services.
AWS intends
Amazon SES (Amazon Simple Email Service) as an alternative to the thorny work
of building a custom messaging platform or licensing an e-mail service from a
third party.
The company
will host Amazon SES on its servers and integrate it with its existing cloud-computing
services. For example, customers of Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) will
be able to send e-mail from applications built and hosted on EC2.
Adam Selipsky,
vice president of AWS,
said sending large quantities of e-mail from
Amazon EC2 addresses a popular request customers have had.
At first
blush, Amazon SES would seem to be a rival solution to Web-based e-mail systems
such as Google's Gmail, IBM's LotusLive Notes or Microsoft's Office 365.
However,
business-knowledge workers use those services to provide personal communication
between them and their colleagues.
Amazon's focus
is on the bulk e-mail customer who wants to send massive quantities of
marketing and transactional messages to promote goods and services. This is a
market in which SendGrid, Postmark and Constant Contact aggressively compete.
AWS already
counts among its customers managed-services provider NeuStar, content
development provider 42 Entertainment, and EyeJot, a video mail platform.
Amazon SES
will save these customers from managing e-mail servers and configuring the
network to handle the message load.
The service
will also provide content-filtering to scan a business' outgoing e-mail
messages in accordance with Internet service provider requirements. The company
posted more details on this on its blog
here.
Amazon SES
costs 10 cents per thousand e-mail messages sent, though Amazon's EC2 or users
of
Elastic Beanstalk, the new platform effort for
Java developers, can send 2,000 e-mail messages for free each day.
Amazon will
report quarterly earnings on Jan. 27. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said
that while Wall Street expects Amazon to report revenues of $13 billion and earnings
per share of 88 cents for the December quarter, he is forecasting EPS of 90
cents per share for the company.
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