Zimbra's ubiquity play with ISPs
Zimbra just closed a deal with XMission, Utah's largest Internet service provider. As part of the deal, XMission will be moving customers who host e-mail with XMission to Zimbra.
It's not necessarily a huge deal, not like Comcast's decision to use Zimbra was. Even so, I like the deal because it demonstrates Zimbra's continued focus on ubiquity.
Zimbra's per-user pricing with ISPs isn't high. But that's the point. Zimbra has always focused on making it affordable for ISPs to seriously upgrade their e-mail offerings with its Web-based Microsoft Exchange replacement. Adoption first, and revenue follows.
Zimbra has been one of the burning, bright lights of open source. It's too bad that it was acquired by Yahoo before it had time to prove just how well it could do. Now that its sales are rolled up into Yahoo's total top-line number, we'll never really know just how disruptive it may prove to be with this ubiquity play.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Oh and then there's this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10053870-83.html?tag=mncol