Amazon Cloud Now Offers Bulk Email Platform

Amazon Web Services has added a large-scale messaging option to its arsenal of cloud-based services, with the launch of a bulk email service for businesses and developers.

AWS intends Amazon SES (Amazon Simple Email Service) as an alternative to the thorny work of building a custom messaging platform or licensing an email 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 email from applications built and hosted on EC2.

Marketing Option

Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS, said sending large quantities of email 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 email 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 email 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.

No Configuration

Amazon SES will save these customers from managing email servers and configuring the network to handle the message load.

The service will also provide content-filtering to scan a business’ outgoing email messages in accordance with Internet service provider requirements. The company posted more details on this on its blog here.

Amazon SES costs 10 cents (£0.06) per thousand email messages sent, though Amazon’s EC2 or users of Elastic Beanstalk, the new platform effort for Java developers, can send 2,000 email messages for free each day.

Amazon will report quarterly earnings on 27 January. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that while Wall Street expects Amazon to report revenues of $13 billion (£8.2 billion) and earnings per share of 88 cents (£0.55) for the December quarter, he is forecasting EPS of 90 cents (£0.57) per share for the company.