Jan 29, 2015 12:02 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Amazon is branching out further and is now making its way into the workplace with an email service called WorkMail.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Adam Selipsky, marketing vice president for Amazon Web Services (AWS), said the company fully expects WorkMail to compete in a market dominated by Microsoft and Google.

"Customers are not happy with their current email solution," he said. "A lot of customers feel those solutions are expensive and complex."

At this point in the so-called "Internet age," email is commodity widely adopted by anyone with a web connection. Many people even have more than one email address, mainly to have a separate one for work.

That is where services like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail figure to make it tough on Amazon to break through. But Amazon is an extremely well established brand and one analyst said the WorkMail service could bring the company an annual revenue of $1 billion.

"It is realistic to assume that Amazon can reach a similar revenue threshold," Colin Sebastian, a Baird Equity Research analyst, told the Journal of an estimate he made for Google's business software.

Amazon's WorkMail will not replace Outlook or Gmail, but would aim to enhance it by improving user friendliness and security, arguably the two most important things in email.

"Email is and will continue to be a critical tool for getting business done, which is why Microsoft has been deeply invested in business email for over 20 years," Julia White, general manager for Microsoft Office marketing, said in a statement to the Journal.

Google, on the other hand, did not comment.

"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," Peter De Santis, Amazon's vice president of AWS Compute Services, said in a press release. "We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests and to help businesses achieve agility and cost savings by letting AWS manage the non-differentiated heavy lifting involved in corporate email and calendaring."

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