Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Zimbra hits 6 million paid users

January 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Zimbra hits 6 million paid users

TAGS: Open Source

I was going to wait until Monday to blog this, but there's a range of other interesting news set to hit the wires then, so I'll put this out now. Just one quarter after reaching the four million paid mailbox mark, Zimbra has now hit SIX million paid users. This is fantastic news. Zimbra now counts more than 1,300 customers worldwide and more than 6,000 administrators and developers registered in the Zimbra community. On Monday, Zimbra is announcing the general availability of the latest Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS 4.5), along with a handful of new customers and partners.

What this doesn't mean is that Zimbra has hit $100M in revenues, which some who apparently know nothing about ISPs or even email speculated at the four million user mark. Not even close. But let's not downplay the significance of this. Six million user is HUGE, even if they were only getting $1/user, given that this is the company's first year in business. Would you be happy with six million customers in your first year of business? Of course you would.

For end-users, the most significant new features are push to mobile devices, availability of the Zimbra interface on low-bandwidth connections, and support for multiple user identities. For admins, this release adds migration tools for Novell Groupwise and Lotus Notes, Mandriva and Ubuntu Linux support, an expanded administration for online backups and Zimlet management, and enhanced security. Very cool.

But do you know what I think is the most significant thing to come out of Monday's announcement? Something that I'm betting 99.999% of readers will have missed: conservative, Midwest companies are buying open source. One of the companies featured in the press release - Harvard Custom Manufacturing - is about as Heartland as you can get. Add that to H&R Block and other Zimbra customers and you start to get a glimpse of just how pervasive open source is becoming.

It's crossing the chasm, in other words, at all levels of the software "stack."

Great work, Zimbra. You're knocking the ball out of the park and making it that much easier for the next open source company to do business...even with "old school" enterprises.

Posted by Matt Asay on January 26, 2007 02:33 PM

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