Aussie email firm Atmail beats Gmail, Office 365 to Raine and Horne deal

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blog Those of you with long memories may recall that Australia has its own version of Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Office 365 email platforms. The company is called Atmail and it’s based in Queensland. In November 2012 it picked up a cool $2 million in venture capital from Australian VC firm Starfish Ventures. Well, already Atmail looks to be picking up new local corporate clients. The AustralianIT reports this morning (we recommend you click here for the full story) that real estate agency Raine and Horne recently picked Atmail for its new email platform, serving some 3,500 mailboxes. A choice quote:

“[Raine and Horne national IT and strategy manager Paul] Sinclair says the company investigated several options including an in-house mail system and offerings from Google and Microsoft.”

I have to say, this is a fantastic win for Atmail. Right now, in Australia, almost every organisation is migrating either to Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange ecosystem (either on-premises, or increasingly through Office 365) or to Google’s Gmail option. To see anyone migrating their email platform to any other system is a huge deal, and especially when it’s an Australian email software/services provider such as Atmail. 3,500 mailboxes is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Look out, Microsoft and Google. There is a new email player in town, and it’s rapidly gaining scale. Suddenly, Australian organisations have a significant third option to run their email systems. Let’s hope Atmail can grow strongly and provide a strong local rival to the major international firms.

Image credit: Atmail

6 COMMENTS

  1. i could be mistaken, but don’t most of the businesses opting for gmail and microsoft choose those as part of an overall “office suite” type application pack, be it via O365 or google apps.

    atmail is purely email and calendaring isn’t it?
    so businesses are still going to need some sort of office suite to manage their documents.

    • it has a few other bits and pieces: storage and archiving. It doesn’t do office productivity apps, as you say. It seems a bit expensive too: $79/user/month for cloud hosted, vs $10/user/month for Google Apps.

      • For Cloud hosted (the most expensive), the minimum is $79/month which includes 50 users and 500GB storage.

        Additional users are $2/month, including an additional 10GB per user.

        e.g. For 100 users:

        Month = $79.00 + 50 x $2.00 = $179.00
        Available quota = 500GB + 50 x 10GB = 1TB

        “On-Premise” (sic) is cheaper.

        Reference: https://atmail.com/portal2/store/

        I’ve used the Atmail web interface and it’s pretty slick. We don’t use the Atmail service but it’s one I’d consider using due to the use of open standards and Australian hosting.

  2. Uhhh, using some inside information here, but RHC (Raine and Horne Commercial) have been using atmail for quite some time now…….

  3. Although they’re apparently an Australian company, their servers are located in the US: San Diego, California and Liberty Lake, Washington.

    When questioned on pricing in Australian dollars their response was: “Unfortunately not, our billing system is based on USD only.”

    As good a news story as this may be, that’s 2 strikes against them for us so we’ll give them a miss.

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