Rackspace and SendGrid partner for turnkey e-mail in the cloud

Today it was announced that Rackspace would integrate SendGrid’s email infrastructure service into its hosting environment—a move intended to help both cloud providers and their enterprise customers to overcome the hassle of building in-house email infrastructure for transactional emails. For service providers getting into cloud services, the inclusion of web-based apps as part of their core services will require a transactional email component. Transactional emails may not seem like the sexiest topic in the world, but they do touch most peoples’ lives day to day—whether getting a welcome message for signing up for a new service or a reminder to re-set a password, or a message about a tagged photo on Facebook. “Apps developers and IT departments usually struggle to find the time and resources necessary to establish robust transactional email environments; it distracts them from the core competencies on which they should focus. With this announcement, we can provide world-class email infrastructure, deliverability, scalability and analytics,” said Nishan Sivathasan, director of corporate development for Rackspace. “About 20% of email gets caught in spam filters, so companies need help with deliverability of emails, especially since transactional email services are becoming a top request for those rolling out Web apps, for which these emails are critical to generating the optimal user experience.”

For cloud service providers reselling Rackspace’s managed hosting, cloud hosting, email and apps products, the announcement means they can possibly move closer to having access to “turnkey” email services, as the SendGrid piece means a best-of-breed solution that helps mitigate the challenge of sending large amounts of email from web applications and servers.

Perhaps this announcement will give cloud providers and their customers another choice, as Amazon not long ago announced its “simple email service” as a means to save companies the expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.

With the Rackspace announcement, Sivathasan contends there is access to richer, more robust capabilities, as well as an upgrade path for more robust reporting, analytics and features, as well as the opportunity to shift control to the customers, should they want to go in that direction in the future.