Rackspace Enhances Hybrid Email System

Many small and medium businesses are moving information off of their premises and into the cloud. Email has been one of the early applications to make this switch, and cloud service supplier Rackspace made a number of improvements to its email service.The company offers customers three options: hosted Microsoft Exchange, Rackspaces email platform, or a mix of the two. The vendor enhanced its hybrid email service in a handful of ways. Customers can now view both Exchange and Rackspace Emai calendars. In addition, Rackspace improved its softwares search speed and quality and simplified the email systems customization features. Also a new dashboard enables administrators to manage Exchange and Rackspace email accounts from a common interface. In addition, the email services are now compatible with Microsoft Outlook desktops and work with Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Mobile phones. Last, each email account now has access to 250M bytes of storage for running Microsoft Sharepoint document management applications. Pricing for the service is $10 per user per month for Microsoft Exchange and $2 per user per month for Rackspace Email.

In business since 1998, Rackspace started off offering small and medium businesses hosting services and branched off into supporting email applications. The company claims to have 99,000 customers. The vendor is in a highly competitive marketplace with Goliaths, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, having moved into the cloud space. Rackspace has done well and the improvements to its email service should appeal to some businesses. However long term, it is unclear whether or not the company will garner the size and the name recognition needed to succeed in the highly competitive cloud marketplace.