(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — “Computing-as-a-service” provider Rackspace Hosting (www.rackspace.com) has unveiled a major release of its business-class hosted email offering, Rackspace Email 7.0, making it a viable alternative to Microsoft Exchange (www.microsoft.com/exchange) at a tenth of its price.
According to the company’s Wednesday announcement, Rackspace Email 7.0 costs only $1 per mailbox, per month, and includes updates to its web mail app, such as right-click functionality, multiple personal calendars, the ability to delegate calendar “write access” to another user such as an administrative assistant, iCal calendar feeds, and improved foreign language handling.
Rackspace Email 7.0 offers customers real POP and IMAP email access from any email or mobile app; web-based email, shared calendaring, contacts and tasks; full synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, Blackberry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile; multi-layer, integrated anti-spam and anti-virus protection; 10GB of storage per user; and 24/7 “Fanatical Support.”
Rackspace’s email offering is in a highly competitive arena, however, Rackspace Email & Apps director Kirk Averett said Rackspace Email 7.0 offers a niche that neither Google’s gmail (mail.google.com) nor Microsoft Exchange fulfill.
“Rackspace email does compete extremely well with something like Gmail, which we see as not really very business oriented, although that may be something Google’s interested in doing more in the future,” Averett said. “Microsoft Exchange is a very good product, but it’s very complex and the interfaces are not always the best, so we spent a lot of time doing usability testing, and awful lot of time trying to deeply understand customer needs.”
Averett explained that, while Rackspace Email doesn’t have the same features as Exchange, it has features that would satisfy nearly all businesses at a fraction of the cost, and it is also compatible with Exchange.
“Obviously, in the business mail space, it’s all about Exchange, so we’re continuing to make headway in addressing the needs of business users, making sure they have the tools available and, heck, we also have the opportunity, let’s be honest, to make advanced features easier for regular human beings to use.”
Rackspace Email & Apps general manager Pat Matthews said there’s no reason a company should spend time, money, and resources in hosting their own email servers, and Rackspace offers its fanatical support to help them move from hosting email in-house to a hosted solution.
“Email is the lifeblood of business communications,” Matthews said in a statement. “With Rackspace Email 7.0, we provide businesses an exciting alternative to in-house email hosting that fulfills the ROI promise of cloud computing.”
Rackspace Email is growing at a rate of about 350 new business domains a day. Rackspace currently provides Rackspace Email and Microsoft Exchange services to more than a million paid mailboxes worldwide via 15,000 direct customers and more than 600 resellers and their clients.
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