Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. He reported to Bryan Lamkin, the SVP of Applications who oversees the global strategy, development and performance for the products cited above.

Before Zimbra, the TechFellow Award winner was CTO of BEA Systems (now an Oracle company) where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family.

So what’s next for him? Well for one thing he will be joining the Board of Directors of rPath, a venture-backed startup that develops solutions companies can use to automate application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The company has posted a Q&A with Dietzen on its website which confirms the rumors of him having left Yahoo.

In the interview, Dietzen says he’s not thinking about what’s next yet, and that he considers himself to be on an open-ended sabbatical for now. He says he wants to ‘disconnect’ for a while to regain some work/life balance and spend more time with his family until he moves on to other things, which will most likely be a startup rather than a large corporation.

Another loss for Yahoo at the senior executive level, and a major one it is.

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Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use. It’s growing fast – in a recent post where Google announced the opening of a reseller program, the company said that more than 1 million businesses and 10 million users use Google Apps today, and 3,000 new businesses sign up daily. The largest business user, Genentech, has 20,000 employees on Google Apps.

When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

Free for everyone lasted until February 2007, when Google announced a premier edition of the service with more storage and an uptime guarantee. The cost was (and is) $50 per user per year.

When Google Apps first launched up to 200 user accounts could be created for each business under the free version. But that limit was quietly reduced to just 100 user accounts. And then when the reseller program was announced earlier this month, the limit was cut in half again, to just 50 accounts.

Google also changed the sign up page for Google Apps. The page used to show (screenshot) a comparison between the free and premium versions. Now it only shows the premium version and offers a free trial. To see the comparison chart you have to click the link “compare to standard edition” to see the free and premium versions compared.

The goal is clear – to get more premium accounts that pay $50/user/year. Income growth has slowed considerably at Google and the company is looking for more ways to ramp revenue, particularly newer revenue streams, and control costs. And it’s more than fine that Google experiments with pricing on these products. But they have to remember that they’re not just competing with Microsoft and its expensive exchange server product; they also have cheaper competitors like Zoho and Yahoo’s Zimbra to deal with as well. They may not have as much pricing flexibility as they think.

Update: Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, emails to say that before the recent change to limit free accounts to 50 users, admins could request additional users without upgrading. The recent limitation was set to encourage reseller enthusiasm. He also says Google has no plans to further decrease the limit:

I run the enterprise/apps division at Google – we met a couple of years ago at the Apps launch. I read your story this AM on Techcrunch. Just a bit of clarification and explanation for our change. Until just now, we actually had no caps whatsoever on # of users on Apps Standard (ie free version). The 100 and 200 user “limits” you saw were actually just the defaults that showed up there – admins could request any additional number they wanted.

As to the question of our motivation, the reality is a little more subtle. If it weren’t for the reseller program, I can say for sure that we wouldn’t have put the cap on the free edition. The reality pre-reseller is that the vast majority of larger businesses opt for the paid version for all the reasons you can guess (support, api access, ldap synch, etc). So the mere imposition of the cap has a trivial direct impact on our revs. However, with the new channel program designed to attract a big ecosystem of resellers, it’s hard to convince them that this isn’t really an issue – eg that they shouldn’t worry about competing with a free product. Indirectly, we think the cap will help us grow revenues more quickly, because it makes it easier to attract high-quality partners.

We started 2 years ago with the belief that we needed a huge installled base first . . . and that subscription monetization would happen mostly in companies of larger than 25-50 employees. And also that we had a very viable ad-supported product for very small businesses, who tend to think more like consumers (free is good). We designed our approach to get a massive user base, and then to get increased monetization as more bigger companies adopt. This isn’t the same as saying that we want to get companies started on “free” and get them to pay later – that’s a relatively small effect in my view. Both user growth and revenue is in fact accelerating. Maturity of the product accounts for that, though we still have a ways to go.

There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” – we have no plans whatsoever to do that.

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Zimbra, the collaborative webmail and calendar company that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007, has launched a new product for academic institutions called Zimbra Hosted that will allow schools to run their webmail portals from the “cloud”. Previously schools would have to run Zimbra’s service onsite or through third party hosting companies; now Zimbra will also give them the hassle-free option of letting Zimbra and Yahoo maintain the servers.

Zimbra currently serves over 400 academic institutions. Earlier this year the company scored a major win over Google and Microsoft Exchange (which also offer a suite of competing services) when it was chosen by Stanford as its Email/Calendar management system for students. At the time, we noted that Zimbra was especially strong for its mobile support as well as enterprise-level features.

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Not a bad outcome for a company whose software development team is based in Bulgaria. PostPath previously raised a total of $30 million. Its most recent round was a $15 million series C in January, 2007. Investors included JAFCO Ventures, Matrix Partners and Worldview Technology Partners.

As software moves to the cloud, Cisco wants to capture some of the higher margins that go along with that, as opossed to simply pushing boxes that quickly decline in value. Many of us already rely exclusively on Web-based email, but corporations are only now making the shift.

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Zimbra Desktop, which is built on Mozilla Prism, is available for Windows, Mac and linux machines. It weighs in at 40 MB, about double the size of Thunderbird. The product promises the robust features of Outlook, which are lacking in Outlook Express and Thunderbird. Users can access Yahoo mail accounts, Zimbra accounts, or any Pop/IMAP supported email boxes. Zimbra Desktop also includes a calendar, contact list and other features.

Based on limited testing (I set it up with Yahoo Mail only for now), the product is a winner. It’s responsive and quick, which is the most important feature for a desktop email client. I like the ability to tag items, collapse conversations, and perform web and local searches via the search bar in the top right corner of the app. If I wasn’t all Mac across the board to keep things synced properly, I’d use Zimbra permanently. Screen shots below.

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Webmail in the educational market appears to be a three horse race between Zimbra, Gmail and Outlook/Microsoft Exchange. And today, Yahoo’s Zimbra won out against the other two in a bid to provide for Stanford University.

This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in “.edu”.

We hear the contest to sign Stanford was particularly heated, and in the end, Google had less luck than when it won the chance to conduct the biggest deployment of Gmail to date across Australian schools.

Zimbra may have won out at Stanford for its particularly strong mobile support (with ActiveSync), as well as its synchronization and administrative functionality. It also boasts certain enterprise-friendly features that Gmail has yet to offer.

More information about this roll out can be found on Stanford Report.

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Zimbra, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server that was acquired by Yahoo this past September, has released version 5.0 of its collaboration suite. The upgrades are various and wide-reaching, with support finally here for the BlackBerry and several improvements made to Zimbra’s browser-based email client.

In addition to managing their email, calendars and contacts, customers can now use Zimbra’s browser-based client to instant message, collaborate on documents via wiki, and share files. Yahoo search functionality, and local search in particular, has been integrated into the browser-based client as well, enabling users to search Yahoo Maps from within their email interface.

Zimbra’s desktop client, which was soft launched last March and emulates much of the browser-based client, now supports non-Zimbra email accounts (like Yahoo Mail and Gmail, or any POP/IMAP account). However, desktop support for instant messaging, document collaboration, and file sharing has yet to be added.

While versions of Zimbra have existed for Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, iPhone and other mobile devices, only now has Zimbra released a version of its server that can work with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and, therefore, BlackBerry devices. Zimbra is only the fourth company, behind Microsoft, Novell, and IBM, to develop compatibility with the BlackBerry server, and the only one to do it without direct assistance from RIM, producer of the BlackBerry. John Robb of Zimbra says that BlackBerry support required a lot of development so that the Zimbra server could emulate Exchange Server and communicate with the BlackBerry server.

Zimbra has passed the 20,000 customers and 11M+ mailboxes marks. Companies can choose to run Zimbra by installing the company’s server package locally or paying a third party to host the software remotely. While Robb says that Zimbra is not focused on providing any hosted solutions soon, it is something that they plan to do in the longer term.

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Our coverage of Zimbra goes back to 2005. They gained wide exposure at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Recently they launched offline functionality.

The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers.

This was a very, very smart acquisition. In one quick move Yahoo is now in the race with Google for the next generation online/offline office suite. I would not be surprised to see them pick up Zoho next. That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.

Update: Here is the Yahoo press release and Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj’sblog post on the acquisition. And here’s the Yahoo official blog post.

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The deal also includes new functionality, including giving Comcast triple play customers (VOIP phone, Internet, Cable TV) the ability to listen to voicemails online and forward via email. Users will also be able to manage instant messaging from the Zimbra client, and the companies are adding Plaxo’s address book functionality into the mix.

Zimbra recently released new software that lets customers access their webmail offline. The company offers its basic service for free via an open-source download. They charge for customer service and also distribute their premium version through resellers. They’ve raised just over $30 million in venture capital.

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I spoke withZimbra Co-Founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj about the history of the company and the new Zimbra Desktop product this morning. Listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch.

Offline access to web applications (and just as importantly, web-based data) is an area getting a lot of attention right now. Firefox has announced that Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores. New startups like Scrybe are experimenting with this offline syncing. Adobe (and competitors) has just released it’s Apollo platform, which lets developers run HTML, javascript and Flash code outside of the browser and when offline.

Most of these products are still being developed (Firefox 3) or have just launched early or private beta versions (Apollo, Scrybe). Zimbra has written its own code to handle offline functionality, and the user experience will be identical whether users are online or offline: open Zimbra in the browser and use the application.

Zimbra Desktop will be available cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and cross browser (Firefox, IE, Safari). The Zimbra web application and all user data is stored on the client computer (the database is Apache Derby). Data is synced real time when in online mode.

Zimbra Desktop does not include drag and drop functionality into the browser (for, say, dragging an attachment into an email), although the company says it will be included in a future release.

All Zimbra source code, including Zimbra Desktop, is open source – I expect other web developers to be taking a close look at how they are architecting things.

Zimbra recenty announced that they reached 6 million paying customers. The company is based in San Francisco, with a ten person office in India. They’ve raised $30.5 million over three rounds of financing, and say they will most likely not need to raise more capital.

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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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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.

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My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can schedule interviews with the teams (if you’d like to talk to me, I’m the guy with a huge TechCrunch sticker on my laptop) (Jeff Clavier also has a TechCrunch sticker on his laptop, but I’m not French, so you’ll know its not me ).

I’m breaking this down into two posts to keep it manageable. Here’s Part 1. Part 2 is here.

Social Text

Ross Mayfield spoke about wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor for wikis. He says its much more than a tool for wikis, however. It’s and “open source synchronous editor for the web” and his vision is that it will be used on many web applications beyond wikis. Want to try out Social Text for free? Mention web2con at socialtext and get a free five-user wiki for a year.

Rollyo

Dave Pell presented Rollyo, the roll-your-own search engine (profile).

You can create a mini-search engine from only those sites you trust or feel have relevant content, and then search against that personal search. He used a travel search example that was quite compelling – searching against just fodors, travelpost and frommers. Saved searches can be private, or public and shared with others.

Joyent

David Young talked about Joyent, a compelling network suite for small groups and companies that includes mail, calendar, contacts, files, etc., and allows developers to mash up systems on their data. Lots of tagging and “smart filters”. Open APIs to allow third party apps. Take the tour here.

bunchball

Rajat Paharia showed off his super-cool flash platform BunchBall. Rajat was also nice enough to give me a personal presentation earlier in the day. Rajat talked about how developers need both infrastructure and distribution to get applications out. BunchBall provides both – a slick flash platform (Flash 8 is required for some applications) along with open APIs, and new third party applications are automatically distributed accross the platform.

Current applications include a number of games and photo-sharing. Rajar also says that Metaliq is creating a multi user texas holdem game, to be released soon.

Check this one out. And contrary to rumors, Rajat did NOT beat me at tic-tac-toe while giving me the demo. He lies.

RealTravel

Ken Leeder talked about his new company, RealTravel. It’s centralized user content with some really sweet tagging and search/find capabilities .

The idea is to leverage user content and social networking to create a personalized experience for travel shoppers and a more effective venue for travel industry marketeres. THus, hopefully, breaking the death spiral that the online travel industry is now in: a race to the lowest price.

Zimbra

Satish Dharmara gave an absolutely stellar presentation of Zimbra (profile), although to be honest Zimbra is so damn cool and full of AJax awesomeness that he could have stood there and babbled and the audience would still have cheered.

Zimbra is an “open source enterprise-scalable collaboration server with intelligent online backup and single mailbox restore. It has hierarchical storage management”. What does this mean? You can’t run it from the Zimbra website, but you can install it on your own server. It’s Outlook as it’s supposed to be.

Read our profile. It (Zimbra, not our profile) rocks. Demo here.

We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like Writely can open people’s eyes to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future.

When you first view the Zimbra demo you may have a similar experience. Zimbra is, basically, a web based outlook/iCal/Thunderbird application in the same way that Writely is a web based version of Word.

At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.

There are some core differences between how Zimbra and Writely approach their respective markets, however. Writely is a proprietary, hosted application (although they import and export in Word and other formats). Zimbra is an open source project, and is presented only in demo form at this point – if you want to run it you have to do so on your own servers.

So while Zimbra is not something you can immediately start using, you can view a hosted demo here and a flash demo here. The source code is available on the download page here.

Zimbra also integrates tagging of messages. It’s very impressive and quite beautiful.

Additional Reading

Solution Watch (thank for the tip, Brian), Ajaxian, batalion, Digital Hobo, Deep’s Home, Alice Hill,