Last month, OVH, the number one hosting provider in Europe and fourth globally, announced that it raised $181M to fuel its North American expansion. Now comes the news that they’re integrating Mailjet into their new OVH Marketplace. Mailjet, who are a key competitor of MailChimp and define their offering as a “the email service for developers”, will now be the only email service present on OVH’s marketplace and will be recommended by OVH to their clients.
As OVH has over 140k servers and hosts more than 18 million web applications, this is obviously a big win for Mailjet. The biggest challenge will clearly be ‘selling’ those OVH customers who’d be a good fit for Mailjet’s services on the proposition. However, the fact that Mailjet’s ‘robust and flexible’ APIs easily enable email management across all applications and that OVH hosting is 100% compatible with Mailjet, making this transition should be a lot easier and more compelling for potential customers. In speaking about the announced deal, OVH adds:
“Mailjet has used the OVH.com infrastructures for a long time, to develop its email services in the Cloud. Mailjet is also a client with whom we are very often in contact, in order to improve our products and services. It is thus completely natural that we are offering Mailjet to be a part of the first players in our marketplace, which will allow Mailjet to be promoted to our clients.”
This deal looks to be a win-win for both companies. OVH’s focus at the moment is pushing heavily into North America. As Mailjet does 30% of their business there, this deal should help them gain even stronger foothold there and will enable OVH to offer the N American market a more comprehensive hosting / value-added services solution. A big question is whether once OVH ramps up in N America, whether Mailjet will try to compete head-on with MailChimp. As Mailjet can essentially leverage OVH’s N American infrastructure and resources when them come online to scale-up rapidly, they may surprise MailChimp and encroach on their territory more quickly than anticipated.