Zimbra

It’s official–  Zimbra is now a part of VMware.

As we settle into our new digs in Palo Alto, you can bet we remain as focused as ever on building and supporting the best open source email and collaboration software for our community, customers and partners. We’re committed to our mission to set the standard for Web-based collaboration and to VMware’s overall mission to simplify IT.

We’re excited to join VMware’s Cloud Services organization, helping to meet increasing customer demand for more public and private on-premises cloud computing services delivered through VMware’s innovative virtualization platform. Zimbra’s modular architecture and APIs make it ideal for virtualization, and for offering cloud-based email and collaboration services.

With VMware’s support, we’re looking forward to accelerating our product roadmap, optimizing Zimbra products for VMware’s vSphere cloud infrastructure, and continuing to build on the record growth that has allowed us to reach more than 55 million paid mailboxes in just five years.

Here’s to Zimbra and VMware!

Big news for Zimbra – we’re excited and looking forward to starting a new chapter as part of VMware. We want to thank Yahoo! for helping Zimbra usher in a period of phenomenal growth over the past 2 years.  And we are proud to have contributed to the current and future success of Yahoo! during this time as well.  Zimbra’s technologies have and will continue to play a role in Yahoo!’s communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.  The Yahoo! team is very happy for us, our customers and our community as we prepare to enter this new era.  We owe Yahoo! a great deal of appreciation for their support.

First and foremost, we want to reassure our community, customers and partners that we stay 100% committed to our mission.  Together with VMware, we will accelerate our investments in Zimbra and strive to be even better at building and supporting the best open source email and collaboration software in the market.  As always, we will work tirelessly to strengthen and grow our business relationships and service our customers and community.

In just five years, Zimbra has grown to become one of the largest email and collaboration providers in the world with Microsoft and IBM, totaling more than 55 million paid mailboxes at over 150 thousand organizations worldwide – that’s upwards of 80% year-over-year growth. We are happy to count among our customers leading cloud providers (Comcast, NTT Communications, Westnet); universities (University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Georgia Tech); companies big (Bechtel, H&R Block) and small (Digg, Mozilla); plus many governments and non-profits (the Drug Enforcement Administration, Malaysian Federal Government, Food for the Hungry).  We are honored by these customers and thank them and our community for the continued support.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite has become a great open source platform because of the people who provide input and guidance each day.  Our recent launch of ZCS 6.0 was a direct result of community and customer feedback.  ZCS 6.0 includes powerful new collaboration features for enterprise users, new capabilities for system administrators, better mobile device management, and the ability to manage Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites (find out what’s new in 6.0 here).

We believe that the shift toward cloud computing and virtualization will continue to change the industry landscape and revolutionize how the IT industry builds, deploys and uses software.   Zimbra is excited to be joining our open source friends at SpringSource, and becoming another cornerstone in an impressive suite of VMware products.  The VMware platform now integrates virtualization, middleware and applications – and enables the decoupling of applications from traditional concepts of linear hardware scaling.   Private and/or public cloud computing networks can work together and applications can be deployed and managed seamlessly across those clouds.  Zimbra products were designed from the ground up with virtualization and the cloud in mind, with a modular architecture and APIs to allow distributed access to data and storage.   Email and collaboration services have always been ubiquitous to organizations, but now the barriers to transitioning them to efficient virtualized environments will be much more seamless.

At VMware, Zimbra will continue focusing on our product roadmap and setting the standard for web-based collaboration.  Look forward to Zimbra Desktop 2.0, more real-time messaging, new ways for sharing content in collaborative workspaces, enhanced team scheduling and business continuity services.  Over time we will also adjust the scope and scale of our roadmap to reflect incremental investment, plus we will integrate Zimbra with VMware’s vSphere cloud infrastructure.

Today Steve Herrod, VMware CTO, wrote an excellent post laying out the emerging VMware strategy and how Zimbra products will fit in; be sure to take a look.

Finally, I’d like to thank the amazing Zimbra team for your hard work in building this fantastic product and this business.   We have built something very valuable to the market and to the industry in just a few years.  As we take this next step with VMware, we will continue our mission – to create an innovative, open source collaboration experience for organizations to use in the cloud and in private on-premises networks.

So on that note, happy new year everybody and stay tuned for a lot of Zimbra news in 2010.

Though the Holidays are in full swing and the big day less than 48 hours away, some of us here at Zimbra are just getting started on the gift giving process.  So naturally we started today by checking out some of our favorite idea spots like UnCrate, Gizmodo and the Adult Swim Store.

Invariably, a visit to Apple was also in order for gadgets and Apps to use as stocking stuffers.  That last bit may sound odd, but as an example, there are no fewer than four iPhones/Touches circulating now in my family and we are not alone.  Not surprisingly, children will also choose a new App over anything we could bring home from the Dollar Store.  So, the iTouch goes back in the stocking with Flick Fishing this year – and voila a new tradition is born. :)

Happily, during the process we discovered a new App benefiting Zimbra users who are on the go.  It’s called the Aderium Companion for Zimbra (App Store URL) and it gives you access to Zimbra Tasks and Briefcase items on the iPhone or iTouch – as well as Wiki pages, a feature we haven’t built into our own mobile web client yet.  It’s quite handy for viewing shared documents and creating new tasks on the go.  It’s also more convenient than using the mobile browser; though it’s not free that’s a small price to pay if you like having email, contacts, calendars, tasks, wiki docs and files on your iPhone natively (i.e. Zimbra Mobile plus Aderium).

Just added to my iPhone and soon to be in my stocking…  Happy Holidays!

Tomorrow in Paris, France there is an all day meet-up for Zimbra community members, partners and customers.  The agenda includes Zimbra roadmap beyond ZCS 6 and will have some basics on Zimlet development with drinks to follow.  It looks like a great opportunity to learn a lot and network with others in the community.  There will be both English and French speakers there, be sure to check it out!

From our French friends:

It’s that time of year again and we are making our way to Denver for the annual EDUCAUSE conference.

We’ve got lots to talk about this year – not only did we cross a huge milestone, reaching 50 million paid mailboxes in less than four years, but we’ve continued to expand our reach in the Edu community (which alone is comprised of millions of paid mailboxes).  New Edu customers this year alone include Eastern Michigan University, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Marietta College, Saint Joseph’s University, Swarthmore College, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Findlay, and Wayne State University.

All of our Edu customers benefit from Zimbra’s rich calendaring and collaboration features, and many are contributing their own custom mash-ups to make Zimbra’s online tools work for best for them. Institutions like University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Simon Fraser University are creating special Zimlets to better serve their students and faculty. You can read more about their specific case studies in our back to school blog series.

Other recent mash-ups include DimDim’s application tab (pictured below), which allow users to access DimDim’s web conferencing services from within Zimbra. Additionally, a new social media Zimlet enables users to read and post tweets to Twitter, or make updates to Facebook and Digg from directly within the ZCS, without having to take the time to visit other websites.

This year we will be joined at the conference by Zimbra customers University of Pennsylvania and Georgia Tech who will be speaking about how Zimbra has streamlined collaboration across their institutions and discuss how implementing a collaborative email and calendar provider can be extremely cost-effective.

If you are going to be at the conference, don’t forget to check out their panel on Friday, November 6th and please stop by and visit us at booth #332. We will be giving away some great prizes!