The Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, possibly the most buzzed-about gadget this holiday season, is obviously a consumer-focused offering. But much like the Apple iPad before it, that doesn’t mean in this bring-your-own-device (BYOD) world it has no enterprise game. Proof: Hosted Microsoft Exchange messaging provider Intermedia has announced support for the Kindle Fire.
It’s small wonder. And with this announcement, Intermedia simultaneously announced its new tablet activation statistics, as per the press release:
- Tablet activations increased105 percent in Q3 2011 over Q1 2011.
- From January 2011 to October 2011 new tablet activations increased 170 percent.
- In October, new tablet adoptions outnumbered Windows, BlackBerry, Palm and other smartphone adoptions – tablets were second only to new iPhone adoptions.
So of course Intermedia would want to take advantage of the rising tablet trend in any way it can. That goes double when the SMB market, long a major focus of Intermedia and its partners, are the ones most likely to let an employee use an outside device — and thus the ones most likely to benefit from their e-mail on a tablet. It’s potentially a good thing: it lets Intermedia unequivocally say “yes” to customers when they ask about getting their Christmas gift online.
On a related note, I have an Amazon Kindle Fire arriving in the mail this week: I’ll be sure to loop back around with my impressions, so keep watching TalkinCloud.
The 
many companies who provide high volume e-mail systems have criticised SES saying that the bulk e-mail business is very complicated and a general solution like Amazon’s approach will not work, with many campaigns likely to be rejected by the fixed rules Amazon has applied to SES. The comments I have read really do appear to be those of desperate organisations whose core business, and a lot of the ‘magic’ they perform has just been disrupted and opened up. One result of the Amazon SES launch for sure is that the price for email marketing is now heading in a southern direction. Further, if Amazon’s record to date with Cloud Management Service is a guide, their service will work effectively, both technically and financially. Amazon has an impressive record of disrupting business models and industries, and I believe they have just added the next to a long list of success stories.