I constantly try to gauge what the generic strategies are for open source companies. Are the products competing on price or feature differentiation? The reason I am such a believer in open source software is because the development and distribution models allow for both. Essentially, open source allows you to not only be less expensive than proprietary vendors but have features that are better. The new version of Zimbra is a great example of this open source continuum. It's more innovative and better engineered than the competition but remains less expensive to buy and manage.
You may have already seen Zimbra's ultra-slick AJAX based email client but the server itself is really what matters. The UI is merely the transport for all of the cool features. But for the moment to get all the slick stuff you need to use the browser. CEO Satish Dharmaraj said that customers were giving feedback saying "don’t give us this experience and then take it away when I get on a plane. Since the user experience mismatch was/is too jarring they have started working on a client-side solution. The plan is to take everything that’s in the product today and take the experience offline by creating a service that runs locally on your PC and does server-to-server sync on the back-end. The goal is present the same experience as you see online with Zimbra, but done via a small footprint. Meanwhile you can still use Outlook or whatever email/PIM/calendar client you desire.
Zimbra will soon be launching a Zimlet Marketplace Directory (a Zimlet is connector from the Zimbra server to another website or service) that will allow developers and customers who are writing Zimlets to donate them back and/try to get generate revenue ala Salesforce.com AppExchange. Things like SMS, traffic reports and Evite are all natively designed into the server. These Zimlets are very cool but there is probably some level of learning curve for users to really take advantage of them.
Speaking of Salesforce, the beta of Zimbra 4.0 will be out over the next couple of weeks and includes some very cool integration with Salesforce.com including the ability to drag and drop emails, contacts etc into the Salesforce.com. It’s actually far slicker than any of the Outlook integration tools I have seen.
The Zimbra 4.0 beta release also includes a new application, Zimbra Documents which includes Wiki functionality based on ALE which allows you to embed things like spreadsheets into your document.
I think it's a very cool product and I would absolutely kill for a integrated email/PIM/calendar solution for the Mac. They sell direct for companies needing 500 seats or more but there are plenty of partners and channels to buy from.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 21, 2006 08:46 PM
