atmail Team Conference 2020

We were thrilled last week to welcome some of our team members from around the globe, to atmail HQ in Peregian Beach, on the beautiful Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Team members travelled in – from Atlanta (U.S.), Polson (U.S.), London (UK), Rotterdam (NL), Turin (IT) and Singapore (SG), as well as from within Australia, from Hobart, Orange, Coxs Creek, Kurrajong, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast and surrounds – to recap, regroup and refocus. It was time to both celebrate our achievements, and to talk honestly about our lessons learned, as we brainstorm current customer cases, as well as our direction for 2020.

 

 

Key themes of our atmail team conference 2020

The two key themes of our conference last week in Australia were:

1. Think customer – which best encapsulates our customer-first focus; and
2. Moving email to the cloud – which best summarises our current (and future) direction. Moving to the cloud is not a new resolution for us – it’s already well entrenched in the way that we operate, the customers that we attract, and the sessions on the agenda at our conference. As an email solutions provider, we are growing our cloud email userbase daily, and we will be continuing to execute on our key strategy of enabling service providers and telcos to move to the cloud. Why? Because we believe that moving email to the cloud is: (a) a better way to do business; and (b) the future of the email industry.

 

1. Think customer

‘Think customer’ is one of our core atmail values. It’s important to us because we would not be where we are today without you, our valued customers.

And we know that we will not succeed in our ambitious future plans unless we keep ‘think customer’ at the forefront of everything that we do.

2. Moving email to the cloud

For regular atmail blog readers, you’ll know that we have blogged before about telcos moving to the cloud, because we see cloud services as an important building block in any digital transformation strategy. Our post 8 Reasons to Move Your Customer Email Platform to the Cloud highlights why we are so committed to supporting telcos and service providers on this journey. As a quick recap, here are what we see as the eight key benefits:

1. Better scalability;
2. Improved speed to market;
3. Genuine strategic value;
4. Reduced costs;
5. Enhanced cost effectiveness;
6. Relief for staffing issues;
7. High security levels;
8. Reliable uptime; and
9. More consistent customer service.

Interestingly, we are finding that email hosting is often one of the first services that telcos are transitioning to the cloud, because running email platforms in-house is not usually a core telco business capability.

Singtel (an atmail customer on our AWS Singapore cloud) is a prime example of an innovative telco that has moved email to the cloud as part of both their pro-cloud vision and their desire to redirect valuable in-house resources. As the largest network operator in Singapore and the owner of 100 percent of Australia’s second largest telco (Optus) as well as 32.15 percent of India’s second largest carrier (Bharti Airtel), the company has been on a cloud journey since 2009, when it announced that it was collaborating with local partners to help establish Singapore as a regional cloud computing hub. Since that time, Singtel has:

• Rolled out a private cloud computing infrastructure on a whole-of-government basis (2012);
• Partnered with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform in the United States;
• Established a secure private connection with Google Cloud Platform in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan;
• Signed a deal with Alibaba Cloud in China to extend coverage of Singtel Cloud Access to six major public clouds across 30 global cities (2017);
• Won awards for their cloud services; and
• Joined forces with atmail to move its customer email platform to an AWS-powered cloud (2018).

In Singtel’s case, the motivation for transitioning email to the cloud was as much of a strategic play as it was a decision about: scalability; branding; end-of-life software/hardware replacement; moving from a CAPEX to an OPEX model; solving a talent shortage; and choosing a reliable email platform that enabled monetisation.

However, others in the industry are resisting – typically due to these 11 Myths Preventing Cloud Email Adoption:

• Myth 1: Cloud email always costs more;
• Myth 2: Cloud email providers won’t let us use our own company branding;
• Myth 3: We can’t trust our email platform if we lose control of our physical infrastructure;
• Myth 4: Cloud email is less secure;
• Myth 5: Cloud email would not adhere to our strict local and/or regional compliance regulations;
• Myth 6: Cloud email has greater downtime;
• Myth 7: We need internal, cloud-hosted email expertise;
• Myth 8: Our region does not have the capability for reliable cloud-hosted email;
• Myth 9: We are based in a developing country, so we have more barriers to adoption;
• Myth 10: We have too much email data to migrate; and
• Myth 11: We can’t move our email platform due to the lack of integrity of our current data systems.

To dispel the myths, and to more fully understand the benefits, we invite you to download our free resource, The Business Case for Moving Email to the Cloud. This resource also includes a handy Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) table for email platforms.

 

Interested in working for atmail?

If you’re passionate about both email and cloud, and you’d love to join the fun at one of our next team conferences, then we welcome your contact here. We are always looking for awesome team members who believe in our mission, are committed to our values, and are genuinely keen to help telcos and service providers deliver the best possible email experience for their customers.

As a bonus, you can either opt for views of the beach (see our HQ pictures below), or your own amazing views at home, because to secure the best talent globally, we know that we need to be flexible and agile – just like we are with our customers!