We first covered Zimbra back in September 2005. Zimbra is an Ajax Microsoft exchange competitor with a webmail service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to handle email, contacts and calendaring. They also offer a great mobile solution. The core product is open source, and Zimbra has a higher end version that sells for $25 per person per year (with various discounts).
Since their launch they’ve grown. And grown. They had 4 million “paid mailboxes” In October 2006. Next Monday they will announce that they now have more than 6 million paid mailboxes over 1,300 customers, a growth of 50% in three months. Sixty percent of their customers are being serviced through resellers.
They have lots of help with the product, too. They’ll be announcing version 4.5 of their Collaboration Suite (which is already available). 6,300 developers and administrators have contributed to Zimbra. The open source version of Zimbra has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands” of times.
The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich.
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Wait, 6 million customers? You said 1,300.
6 million paid mailboxes. 1,300 customers. This averages at around 4,615 mailboxes per customer!
Samir > 6 million accounts / paying users / customers. Therefore a decent wedge of the 1,300 direct customers must be huge resellers or big fat enterprises. This is one of the soundest business models I’ve seen on Techcrunch in a long time.
Mike,
>> Since their launch they’ve grown. And grown. They had 4 million “paid mailboxes” In October 2005.
Should that be 2006?
Wait a minute, looking at the pricing link on their website, something doesnt add up. r u saying the company is actually making > 180 million in revenue? I think, no way.
I’m sure they announced 4M mailboxes in October 2006. But a great performance anyway!
Uhh.. yeah… Misleading title much?
According to those standards, Dreamhost has a gajillion paid accounts… See for yourself… http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html 3000 mailboxes on a basic account and I’m sure they have thousands of accounts.
That’s a pretty bad metric standard to claim 50% growth by. 1300 accounts is not impressive. One of my sites has 920 accounts and gets about 10 accounts a day with no advertising… just buzz.
typo fixed…thank you.
The title isn’t at all misleading - this company gets paid “per seat” with rate card pricing starting at $25 per year per seat. I am very sure that the average is far lower than that, but it is still very impressive growth and a great product.
Uh oh, this brings back memories. I used to work for software.com/openwave, and we ran into this issue: when to call a mailbox a paid or installed mailbox. It also becomes important when dealing with revenue recognition issues.
It may sound straightforward, but if a reseller buys, for example, a 100,000 user mailbox LICENSE, is Zimbra counting those as “paid” mailboxes? If so, that may be misleading to people. Because none of those mailboxes may even be active. And the reseller isn’t paying anything near retail for the mailbox. Resellers might be paying a few bucks per mailbox license fee (probably not recurring revenue), plus maintenance and professional services (if any).
Are any of the readers one of the 6 million Zimbra users? 6 months ago we my company tried it out, the install was fairly ridiculous and the actual software was clunky and hard to use, though it showed promise. Has it gotten significantly better?
We use it- no complaints thus far.
Looks like a great success.
The edgeio team uses it. Was very slow a year ago but apparently it’s totally cool now.
I changed the title to “Paid Mailboxes.” Obviously some people were confused by the original title, so it needed to be amended.
Congrats to them, love hearing of companies that solved a problem and are successful.
Hats off to them
-Scott
if they had even a fraction of 6 million as paying customers, they wouldn’t need funding: but good luck to them
We’ve been using it for a year. It’s a great product and supported by a responsive team. Just installed 4.5. Has lots of enhancements.
Its great to hear about these types of companies, with these numbers and people commenting about the service, I will have to check it out for some of our smaller clients.
The CEO’s are now days saying that open source is ultimately good for knowledge dissemination and also user adoption may laed to a subsequent purchase.
Zimbra is indeed a fine product. I use it through a service provider in the UK and found it via this site - so thanks. My mobility previously made getting email difficult, and I didn’t see the Blackberry as worth the money for a small business (and I don’t like the handsets, and the web experience is poor etc. etc.). Things have improved greatly without Outlook, Exchange, or POP3 to worry about. The one small downside is that I have mobile connectivity, but it isn’t “push”, and it requires me to use a Windows Mobile phone using the IMAP protocol - performance isn’t great let me tell you. It could do with a J2ME client really (perhaps there is one and my provider isn’t aware yet).
$150mm or greater is the implied revenues according to your article. This sounds CRAZY high for a company I’ve never heard of before.
$25 x 6mm paid = $150mm
With this kind of growth rate, they should beat BEA’s record for fastest company to $1 billion in revs in tech. They also have about the same number of paid users as Netflix. Golly, I don’t know why Netflix has been painstakingly working so hard to get a few million users when this company I can’t even remember the name of has already got 6mm and growing and growing and growing.
I suggest you check the numbers again, something is dramatically wrong.
I mean, Yahoo and Google already do this business model for free, and I don’t know what’s so special about a company that does email, contacts, and calender. WHOOOOOWHEEEEEEEEE!!! email? contacts? calender? ALL IN THE SAME PACKAGE!?!?! Awesome!
Hmm, does the back button work now?
Last time I tried their demo, back button logged me off…
Their customers are either anti-Exchange folks or people who cannot afford it.
Good luck to them.
I hate when companies tout opaque numbers. If you want to boast about things with the word “paid” then list a revenue number, plain and simple.
Has anyone tried Open-Xchange? They have a perpetual license so long-term would be less expensive. Congrats to Zimbra on their success though, their growth rate iis amazing.
I just wish they had betting open source installation instructions.
I’ve tried maybe a billion times to install it on my dedicated server but can’t figure it out.
Other than that it looks awesome.
Do you think this will make my Open Source stocks rise?
http://iam.always.online.fr/tr.php?wordid=2012
Impressive any way you slice it. Even at $0.50/mo/paid after discounts + rev share with channel partners, that’s a $3m/mo run-rate to build on.
Will be interesting to see where corporate version of Gmail goes
I find it bizarre they don’t offer a hosted product. Yeah, through partners, but why let others take a cut? Salesforce.com has the right model.
Hi Mike,
I would recommend editing or deleting the first comment due to the web preview from Snap that shows up when their name “Wonderful Person” is moused over. Just thought you should know.
Is that Spam?
Numbers don’t add up to me? Got to remove that first comment as well.
God bless the classic low market disruption. Google has been there. Looks like it’s open source’s turn.
http://www.sumolabs.com/blog/z.....-microsoft
J | sumolabs.com
Why do they post stuff about “paid” (wink wink) members but not revenue numbers? This is like Baskin Robbins counting each sample handed out as a paid customer.
Our small business of 30 people are using Zimbra as our mailserver, and have done so for 9 months now. The install was (unlike some commenters claim) extremely easy on RedHat (debian version not available when we installed the first time).
The webmail system is smooth, has an integrated calendaring function, is easy to use and can sync to many mobile devices..
The support is excellent, and yes I would much rather pay Zimbra the per seat pricing for this than Microsoft for Exchange (which I can’t run on Linux anyway..) Zimbra is also providing anyone in our organization with proper email, regardless what platform they’re running, and where they are.
Their administration kit is also worthwhile, but what could have been better is the online documentation (via man pages)..
ryan, thanks. done.
They r earning. It is a cash cow business model. Why do they still need funding? The figure is over convincing!?
Paid Configured Used…
While decent growth, I would like to see what real $$ is and real configured numbers are and what real Used mailboxes is.
I’ve switched to Zimbra as a consilidated package for managing users, E-mail services and spam/virus detection. The only complaint I had is that I’ve had to swap to a different OS than my company standard to run this app, however, I have been pleased so far. The AJAX interface is a little sluggish, but I’m looking forward to the simpler web/html based interface in v4.5 I use it for my primary tool for managing email, via the web interface, Mail.app/iMAP or from my HipTop device - No problems. Hands down more versitile app than Exchange, and as DB noted, you don’t need to use Windows to run Zimbra.
Things like the H&R Block deal add a lot of mailboxes to the numbers too.
They have almost 135,000 employees, and I imagine they pay a very low per mailbox rate for their employees. Microsoft is trying to get this business back, so it will be interesting to watch.