Why Email is Still Important for Telcos, with atmail’s CSO, Erik Rijnders

Last month, Erik Rijnders, our Chief Sales Officer (CSO), sat down with the Telecom Review team at GITEX in Dubai, to talk about why email is still important for telcos. If you run a telco email platform, we invite you to watch the short video below (or read the transcript following) to learn Erik’s take on the topic.

 

 

Transcript of Telecom Review’s GITEX interview with Erik Rijnders, atmail’s CSO

 

About atmail

So, atmail is a company from Australia, and they’ve been in emails and email platform solutions for more than 20 years, in the meanwhile. They started in webmail and that went around to thousands of customers that could download and use this software. And we were like a typical, real small company that wasn’t growing, per se. About one and a half years ago, we’ve agreed with our investors, who are also in Australia, to turn this around and look at the opportunity to grow it and turn this into a more professional email platform, for which we already had the technology. It’s all based on open source. And we are delivering on that new strategy.

So, we are now into a couple of tier [twos and] threes, in the world. Notably, we’re in [Australia, the United States and] Japan, we’re here in Saudi with large customers, we are in Singapore. We’re growing a lot in Europe, with operators. It’s typical, the email, an alternative from what people know from Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail, or Microsoft 365 – from consumers, going into small and medium enterprise emails. So, we focus basically on wherever the opportunities are, and right now, this is worldwide.

 

About cloud-hosted email platforms

Cloud is the talk of the town. We reckon and agree with the analysts that email will probably go 80 percent cloud-based for all enterprises by 2025, or maybe earlier.

 

Why is email important for telcos?

So, that’s a really good question. So, telcos actually ask this question themselves as well. Email is the oldest service on the internet. And I think it’s still one of the most important services, even though maybe not the sexiest, but it’s still growing. There is a couple of billion inboxes around, and that number is still going up.

Now, you can go with an operator and have a phone number, and that’s becoming more and more a disposable resource – not a resource that people would know about. And there is one thing in an email address is that you cannot easily port it from one operator to another. Actually, it is not possible. The internet standards by themselves would not allow that.

So, it is really, a very powerful retention method. So, if you’ve got somebody who uses your email very actively in your operator, with your operator domain name, or a domain name that you as an operator kind of hold, then it’s a really powerful retention method.

On top of that, for operators, it is really important to have this channel. So, webmail (that we all know from Yahoo! and Gmail), is also a lot more important than a lot of operators still think. It is a good access to also send your invoices to the customer, and to have this daily conversation with the customer, to present promotions, maybe very targeted ads, and do any other communication in the webpage. So, that is very important.

We have case studies by operators that even have considered to outsource email, or to maybe discontinue the service, because yes, there is sometimes a lot of work involved to keep it alive, if you do it itself.

And those operators, you know, to be in Australia, we’ve got one that we know about, thought that if they were to do away with email, it would cost them like half a billion dollars, because really, the [customers] that use it, are like the most valuable customers of their customer base.

END

 

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atmail is a cloud services provider that powers more than 170 million mailboxes worldwide. We offer modern, user-friendly, cloud hosted email (99.99% uptime and your choice of US or GDPR-compliant EU data centres), as well as on-premises webmail and/or mail server options if you want to keep your data in-house. With 20 years of white label email expertise, you can trust us to deliver customer email platforms that are secure, stable and scalable. For more information, please contact us here.