The ISP market
For service providers, Pflaum says, a key strength of Zimbra is the ability to do online backup and restore of a system, including restoring down to a single user's mailbox: if one mailbox gets corrupted, there's no need to restore the entire system. And the system supports hierarchical storage management, allowing an ISP to put more recent messages on higher-grade disks and older messages on slower, cheaper ones.

"There's nothing different in the UI—it's something that could probably be measured in milliseconds in terms of the response when they click on that old message—but it allows the service provider to provide very large mailboxes and not eat it on huge storage costs," Pflaum says.

Different classes of service, Pflaum says, can also be managed on a single server. "You can provision one group of users who've just got 500 MB of storage and IMAP and group calendar, but they don't have a Microsoft Outlook connector," he says. "A second group of users, still running on the same server, can be in a class of service that has 2 GB of storage and the Outlook connector—and then a third group of users might just be the consumer users who have webmail, POP access, and 350 MB of storage."

Pflaum says the product is appropriate for ISPs of all sizes. "We work with service providers who have down to 100 business users, and we're working with service providers who already have tens of thousands of users but are in the process of doing deployments that are going to be in the hundreds of thousands—and we're in evaluations right now with service providers with over a million users," he says.

The interest that Zimbra has received from the ISP market, Pflaum says, has been a pleasant surprise. "We built it from the start to be hosted, and we expected there'd be some interest there," he says. "But we were really amazed to see how much there was. We've had over 350 hosting providers contact us at this point, and we don't do cold calling or outbound selling—so we see it as a very viable market."

Search as a selling point
Marshall Howe is the CEO of application service provider Amicus, which has been working with Zimbra since the first quarter of 2006. In 2005, Howe says, the company began looking for a new e-mail platform. "The further we looked, the more we started finding all the people that were trying to do stuff with Ajax and Web 2.0 type clients," he says. "And so that ultimately led us to Zimbra."

Zimbra's indexed message store, Howe says, is a key strength. "I was a big Outlook user for years and years," he says. "If you've used Outlook, you know the limitations with the .psd size—and it's hard to search. Since I've migrated to Zimbra, I've got all of my .psd files loaded into the IMAP. My Zimbra IMAP folder is 2.5 GB, and I can search that entire thing. And it just makes it so much more usable: you end up having access to information that, before, you probably wouldn't have spent the time to get."

And Howe says Zimbra's search capabilities are the best he's seen. "Any e-mail that I get, whether it's in an attachment or in the text of the e-mail, it's all indexed, and it's all searchable," he says. "That's very unique. And their context sensitivity with their Zimlets—for example, if it says 'today' in the message, you can mouse over 'today' and it pops up your calendar—that's very attractive for a firm like Amicus. We've connected it to our archiving and e-mail surveillance product, and it was a very easy process to make it work in conjunction with our current platforms."

Though Amicus has taken advantage of the full range of support options, Howe says the open source basis of the product was also a key selling point. "We've invested in their infrastructure, so at least we can fall back on the open source if something happens," he says. "That was a key point in our decision-making process."

And the response from Amicus' customers, Howe says, has been phenomenal. "This is a considerable upgrade from our previous webmail client—we were just using Horde—and most of the people that we hosted e-mail for were just POPing it anyway down into an Outlook or a Eudora client," he says. "Now, with the Zimbra platform, we have a lot of people that are taking another look at the web client and saying, 'Hey, maybe I'll just use that.'"

A timely solution
Burton Group analyst Peter O'Kelly says Zimbra seems like the right solution at the right time. "There are a few trends coming together that the folks at Zimbra have been astute about targeting," he says. "One of them, certainly, and one of the things that they're most widely known for right now, is the so-called Ajax user experience, where it's a browser client but it doesn't feel like a browser application. It feels like a very solid rich client user experience—and I think that's a very exciting opportunity for them, because there are a lot of organizations that would like to be able to take advantage of rich client user experiences without having to deal with all of the installation and support for native client installed applications."

Another aspect of Zimbra's timeliness, O'Kelly says, is the indexed message store. Between the search capabilities and the Zimlets, he says, Zimbra makes huge volumes of e-mail much easier to handle. "Zimbra could help to alleviate some of the crushing, overwhelming inbox nightmares that a lot of people have right now," he says.

For ISPs, O'Kelly says, Zimbra can serve as an excellent way to differentiate their services by offering consumers and small business a new level of functionality. "Zimbra's saying, 'We can give you a lot of the capabilities that have been previously associated with things targeted at large enterprises, but we can put it out there with an architecture and a business model that makes it reasonable even for service providers that are targeting consumers or small organizations,'" he says.

The closest competitor to Zimbra that O'Kelly sees in the market is Scalix—though Scalix is more specifically enterprise-focused.

Companies like these, O'Kelly says, have much more flexibility than their established competitors. "Historically, the challenge was to get a traditional independent software vendor kind of ramp-up—you would have lots of customers and build up your company to do it," he says.

"These days, with a company like Zimbra, if you're offering it primarily as a service, you don't have the traditional expense model that software companies used to have."

Ultimately, O'Kelly says, Zimbra is redefining the concept of a messaging solution. "This is not just an e-mail company," he says. "That's what most people are going to get from their initial impressions of it—and that's a big driver, because there are a lot of people who need better alternatives for e-mail, especially small to medium sized businesses and individuals—but this is a company that's got its sights set on much more than e-mail."

—End

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