What do Digg, Mozilla, the University of Bern Switzerland and the Times of India have in common? According to an announcement today, they are all among the 1000+ customers of web based open source communication and collaboration suite Zimbra.
Founded in 2003 in San Mateo, California the company today announced that it has passed four million paid hosted and on-site mailboxes. That’s a small but growing and very significant number compared to the 150 million plus seats sold by Microsoft Exchange. Zimbra took $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.
We’ve profiled the moves toward a web based office by Google, Zoho, Microsoft and countless small startups. Zimbra includes a long list of features that other companies are just beginning to offer. Microsoft says that Exchange Server 2007 is due out at the end of this year or early next year; if it does in fact become available as a final release in that time frame it will be interesting to see if it can do what Zimbra can do.
The webmail client looks and acts a lot like GMail but supports email, calendar and contacts from Outlook.
There’s RSS feed reading, Salesforce integration, mobile access without download of a separate client (no Windows mobile support though apparently), tagging, document and spreadsheet sharing and collaboration and Ajax embeding of rich documents inside one another. Zimbra has explicit support for mashups and the kinds of voice integration that Microsoft products require third party tools to perform.
It’s an impressive offering that’s obviously growing in adoption. If you’re looking for evidence supporting the viability of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Zimbra’s customer announcement today makes for quality fodder.
How come Mozilla doesn’t use Thunderbird or do they?
never mind..now I get it.
There is no such thing as Byrne, Switzerland. You are looking for Berne.
This is great,
it really goes to show what can happen when the big guys move slow, and the small guys listen to their captive audience. A faster development cycle and richer feature set will win, regardless of price everytime.
$100 million in revenue within 1 year of launching? That’s what you think Zimbra probably has? at least? With a list of customers that includes Digg, Mozilla, Times of India that join customers and partners (be wary of releases that mix the two) such as H&R Block. Did H&R just do their taxes to be a partner or are they actually using it.
Marshall — you’ve GOT to be kidding. $100 million? Suggest you dig a lot deeper.
Know what happens to companies that earn that kind of money in their first year?
How do we get the 4 Mil number verified independently? Hard to imagine big old world customers like H&R switching to a solution like this. Most such organizations use Lotus Notes if not Outlook.
I like Zimbra but the webUI has high client side hardware requirements. On a Centrino 1.2 640MB I still feel like the UI lags. Gmail runs many times faster. My firefox memory usage right now (running only zimbra and some extensions) is 60MB.
Yeah, it may not be $100 million. I’d speculate 10 – 20 MM. Anyways, it’s still pretty good performance, but I don’t see it becoming a big success. For all of Microsoft’s delays, MS Exchange is a really good product with a lot of integration options (i.e. Cisco CallManager VOIP platform)
Great job by the Zimbra guys for establishing themselves in the market. Wish the analysis was a little stronger here. If I had to bet my life on it, I would guess around $2M to $6M for this year. They are deployed by ISPs around the world. While those ISPs may charge more than the $.30 per mailbox that GoDaddy charges, they aren’t getting much. I saw one plan where the cost per mailbox is $2-3 http://www.smed...ting-zimbra.asp. And the ISP needs to have some kind of markup. Regardless, it’s a nice product that fits the growing appetite for open source products in the enterprise.
I’ve got hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, school email, company email…I don’t see why I should use any other email services.
I found it was quite slow to load, not sure about it now…
No matter what I am out of fashion I guess. 8-\
Has anyone actually tried installing this clunker? Zimbra has promise the usability is lacking and as people have said previously, it runs really slow. We tried to replace a wiki/forum type of setup with Zimbra in my office but it was a hassle all the way around.
It will probably be great in a couple years though.
Given the fact that Zimbra has 4 million paid accounts and is selling to well-known clients, isn’t it customary for companies this size to include financial reports on their website? I tried searching on Zimbra, but couldn’t find anything. I’m sure that potential investors and other Zimbra clients would like to see the financial direction that Zimbra is headed.
Zimbra is making a major blunder by focusing on the client when the money is with the server.
An average of 4000 users per enterprise? Not even MS comes close to those numbers and there’s no way they’re getting an ARPU of $25.
H&R Block uses temporary mailboxes (they’re a seasonal business) for part time workers and is probably paying more like pennies per box per user. Their large number (100,000+ for a few months per year) is skewing these figures.
Dig a little deeper guys- part of journalism is scepticism.
By the way, the money is not with the server in an SaaS model and they don’t need to publish numbers- they’re privately held.
Martin, you’ve proved my argument. Everyone equates Zimbra with its Ajax front-end. But what Zimbra is selling is an Exchange-like server. Zimbra is not doing *any* hosting and is *not* an SaaS vendor.
Scalix seems like the better play to me.
I agree, Zimbra needs the SaaS model. I personally think it’s crazy that companies still host their own mail servers. What an expensive pain (sys admin + backups + network/firewall issues).
I am impressed with the number of users, but I just don’t see Times of India paying anywhere close to $25/year for email access…It will be more like $2.50 if that…
In any case, great job by Zimbra gaining traction the way they have in what most people considered was a mature and settled market.
Seriously, I doubt it. I don’t see any compelling reason to use Zimbra, even for free.
The $25 per mailbox is for conversion of a pst file to zimbra, not the annual service fee.
Does Zimbra or Scalix offer a hosted option only for Small businesses?
I emailed Zimbra with a question a month ago–still no response. Who do they think they are, Microsoft?
Personally, I have paid mailbox too, but not with Zimbra, instead with another web Internet Service Provider (ISP). Not bad, I have been using for about 10 years.
Note to JimmyV:
The Zimbra Hosting pricing you noted are monthly charges, not annual charges.
Hence, at 1200+ user level the annual charge per user is $30/yr. That is presumably split 50/50 between the ISP and Zimbra.
However you are right, more accurate numbers would be ‘interesting’.
Err .. See their pricing http://www.zimb...ts/pricing.html
They are charging $2 a month . Everybody that uses the email in corporate already has a job and company already pays a salary to all those people . What is $2 more a month if it will save at least the $2 a month they are charging . If you think $2 a month is much what about all the computers and monitors and phones and desks and chairs and insurance and and and
I thought Zimbra was founded in Seattle, not San Mateo ?
But later they probably opened an office in San Mateo to be closer to the tech community + VCs?
So in 2003, I think it was founded in Seattle?
I have previously tested Zimbra long ago as an alternative to my exchange but it was not ready for mainstream.
Well I will really try them again tonight
In Europe, suspect its not much more than a few thousand. We’re probably Zimbra’s biggest hoster in UK and have about a thousand users. Mind you that’s from none at all in July! So it definitely is growing!
i like this blog
4 million Paid users – Absolute Hogwash!!
http://www.pcwo...re/article.html
IDGNS: How many users and paying customers does Zimbra have?
Dharmaraj: We have 4.5 million users and about 450 paying customers.
quanta,
Thanks – I was going to post the exact same quote. I think that this is more like it – Zimbra has 4 million plus users.
I even think this number is a stretch. It’s hard to quantify number of users, and you know that they;re going to define and estimate on the high end.
What is a paid customer, anyway? If an ISP buys Zimbra under the appropriate license and offers it as part of its broadband offering, has 10,000 subscribers of its service, then Zimbra gets to count 1 paid customer. So it’s not a useful metric anyway.
BudgetMailboxes.com is an Authorized Internet Retailer for Architectural Mailboxes, Auth-Florence, Blomus Mailboxes, Bluegrass Woods, Inc, Bobi, Brandon Industries, Curbvault Mailboxes, Dahlhaus, Dvault, Ecco Mailboxes, Gaines Manufacturing, Good Directions, House Art, Knobloch, Mayne & Salsbury, Mayne & Whitehall, Mayne Post, New England Woodworks, QualArc, Salsbury Industries, Streetscape Inc Mailboxes, Still River Designs, Whitehall Products, Mail Keeper— and every other brand we offer.