Zimbra hits 20 million paid mailboxes

Last I checked in June, Zimbra, Yahoo's open-source e-mail and calendar software, was at 11 million paid mailboxes. This was a healthy jump from 8 million paid mailboxes in May 2007 and the 4 million paid mailboxes TechCrunch reported back in October 2006.

Well, on Monday The VAR Guy reported there are 20 million paid mailboxes for Zimbra, a massive increase in roughly seven months. It's likely that a big chunk of these came from Zimbra's deal with Comcast. Still, that is amazing momentum.

I mentioned the other day that a significant customer uptake for Zimbra would be much more meaningful than IBM and Microsoft trading customers back and forth. Well, 20 million paid mailboxes spread over 30,000 customers is much more significant than IBM beating its chest over nabbing 5 million mailboxes from Microsoft.

Could Zimbra be the foundation for an enterprise challenge from Yahoo? I wouldn't rule it out.

However, to get there Zimbra/Yahoo has an uphill challenge, as a big percentage of Zimbra's customers fall into the education and small- and medium-size business markets. It's a hard sell to get enterprises to swap out their e-mail systems, and the standard open-source entry point (department-level deployments) doesn't work for e-mail (unless, of course, the customer wants to scale out with Cisco's Linux-based PostPath drop-in Exchange replacement).

Perhaps Yahoo/Zimbra should focus on building PostPath-esque drop-in Exchange integration?

[Russianspi]

Zimbra has taken strides towards being able to integrate with an Exchange Deployment. Interoparability between Exchange and Zimbra is one of the places where Zimbra is working: http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/are-you-free-or-busy.html

[Matt Asay]

Cool. That's the missing link, and hopefully with Yahoo!'s finances behind the effort it will blossom. I'm a Zimbra customer and absolutely love the product/service.

[supercollab]

Wow, this is tough to believe. Any breakdown of this? Any idea how many are active?

[OnceYouGoMac]

Actually you might want to check your numbers. I spoke with Zimbra recently and their numbers are now closer to 50m. Comcast is huge for them but they are not the only one.

[Matt Asay]

Wow! I talk with the Zimbra guys often, but not usually about this. I'm going to check with John Robb today to ask. This is shocking if true.

[loose_screw]

Zimbra's web site still claims 20m.

[john_robb]

Matt is right that we are officially at 20M per the website. We are growing very quickly right now and you should see an update soon beyond 20M.

[baetica]

Zimbra is quite simply the best executed business-class mail product built in the last ten years. It's not at all surprising that it's taking significant share, and will continue to take significant share in the uncontested space of SME and non-profit. Unless yahoo screws it up (which used to be a good bet) it should continue to grow and eat the mid-market over time. People have no personal affection for Outlook. It's not a product people love to use.

It was a scandal that Zimbra sold the company when they did for as little money as they did. I don't think they knew their own worth.

[MMC Racing]

Former Notes users seem to love Outlook.. Not sure if that is an Outlook strength or just shows how bad Notes is an an email client.

[supercollab]

so 19.9M comcast, 0.1M the rest of the world?