Mozilla isn't just about browsing anymore.
While the foundation made its name with the increasingly popular open-source Firefox browser, it is quickly moving beyond its roots, particularly in the area of e-mail. With the launch of Raindrop, its Google Wave-like unified messaging and collaboration system, as well as corporate uptake of Thunderbird, Mozilla may soon extend its reach well beyond its browser base.
Corporate America hasn't done much with Mozilla's Thunderbird, a competitor to Microsoft Outlook. Europe, however, has given it a warm reception. For example, the French tax authority recently selected Thunderbird to power 130,000 of its personal computers, replacing IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
It's a massive deal for Mozilla, though in the grand scheme of things, it's still tiny. Even so, it's an indication that Mozilla's e-mail story is credible, and could lead to greater adoption of Thunderbird and, eventually, Raindrop.
Much of Firefox's early traction was in Europe. The same could hold true for Thunderbird and Raindrop.
The question for me, however, is how it gets funded. Google has essentially funded Mozilla's browser development for years. It's unclear who the "Google" is for Mozilla's messaging ambitions, or whether the foundation intends to sell subscriptions to use the software through its for-profit corporation.
Regardless, Mozilla's presence in the messaging market is welcome. While we already have an exceptional open-source competitor to Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino in Zimbra, given the importance of messaging and collaboration to enterprise computing, it's useful to have an open-source foundation involved, too. About the only organizations that won't like this increased competition are the proprietary incumbents.
Lost in the news of Zimbra's release of version 6.0 of its collaboration suite is the importance of one very big number: 50 million. That's how many paid mailboxes Zimbra claims now, a number that puts it within spitting distance of IBM Lotus Notes (approximately 145 million paid mailboxes) and Microsoft Exchange (approximately 175 million paid mailboxes). Whatever the truth to rumors that Zimbra is up for sale, Zimbra is an appreciating asset for Yahoo, not a depreciating one.
For one thing, it's important to consider just how explosive this growth has been. In January 2009, Zimbra was at 20 million paid mailboxes. By March, that number had jumped to 40 million paid mailboxes, perhaps a consequence of Comcast mailboxes coming online. (Comcast chose Zimbra to power its Web mail service in 2007.)
That's a lot of growth in a very short period of time. Zimbra appears to have more than doubled its business in the past year.
In fact, if you track the paid-user data for Zimbra, it's very apparent that Zimbra's momentum has been increasing since its Yahoo acquisition, not decreasing.
Such momentum is built on a vibrant, growing community. Zimbra has roughly 10,000 active members on its forums, growing from 5,000 total forum registrations in 2006 to more than 20,000 in December 2008, the last date for which I have accurate data.
At the time of its acquisition in 2007, Zimbra was generating approximately 30,000 downloads per month, a number that has held constant even as a greater proportion of its community elects to pay for Zimbra's Professional Edition.
Yahoo may not know whether it wants to be an enterprise software company (Hint: it doesn't), but Zimbra definitely stands out as an enterprise software product. While the company used to mainly find traction with universities and SMBs, its customer list now includes companies like Bechtel, Century21, H&R Block, Raytheon, and more.
Perhaps as a sign of this growing enterprise clout, Zimbra has caught the eye of Red Hat, which works closely with Zimbra, most recently jointly selling to the Peruvian government.
ZDNet's Larry Dignan may be right in suggesting that Zimbra's news appears to package the company for a sale but, again, even if so, it's clearly because Yahoo doesn't know the way to sell enterprise software, and not because Zimbra can't. If Zimbra continues to grow as it has, within a year it will be taking significant market share from industry leaders IBM and Microsoft.
Zimbra has already caught Microsoft's attention. With Zimbra's 50 million paid users, apparently Redmond is not the only one to notice the company.
Update @ 3:29 Pacific on September 30, 2009:
It's true, as reflected in the comments, that at least some of this growth is due to more and more Comcast subscribers coming online. Surely such users are, on average, not as active as IBM or Microsoft email customers, which tend to be corporate users. Point taken.
But I think this is also a complaint that makes less and less difference as a greater share of Zimbra's customers are enterprises, as reflected in its recent Bechtel deal. There are only so many Comcasts (though I doubt Zimbra would be disinclined from signing up more), but that's not the future for Zimbra, anyway. Enterprises are.
Hence, it may be momentarily inaccurate to compare apples (Zimbra) with oranges (IBM/Microsoft), Microsoft's own internal positioning against Zimbra, as linked to above, suggests that Zimbra's competitors recognize the threat and don't pooh-pooh its numbers as "just Comcast."
The federal economic stimulus package provides $19 billion to upgrade the U.S. health care system to digital records. It's a nice gesture, but the U.S. federal government has already developed a robust medical ERP system that could significantly improve U.S. health care. It's called VistA. It's open source.
It's already paid for.
VistA was developed by the U.S. Veterans Administration and the medical professionals involved in its extensive hospital network. Read: doctors developing software for other doctors.
This bottom-up development effort appears to be working: the VA hospital system consistently delivers superior care at less cost, as noted by ZDNet. As a volunteer at my local VA hospital, I get to see it firsthand.
Better quality health care at a much lower price. What's the punchline?
At first glance, there is none. VistA works, and works well, particularly when packaged and delivered by companies like Medsphere, perhaps the most prominent advocate for the open-source health care ERP system.
Scratch the surface, however, and you quickly run into a major problem with VistA: MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System). MUMPS is the archaic programming language in which VistA was written, and which perpetuates its inflexible architecture.
Though some suggest the specialized knowledge needed to program in MUMPS is a selling point, let's put it this way: in the programming universe filled with PHP, Java, .Net, and other constellations of programmers, MUMPS is like a single Red Dwarf. It's not going anywhere except into oblivion.
There are other open-source answers to the U.S. health care problem, including the federal Connect project and Axial Exchange, which was set up by former Red Hat executives to commercialize these federal efforts. But none is more proven than VistA, which has successfully served U.S. veterans for many years.
One company, Software Revolution, claims that the MUMPS-based VistA code could be converted to Java at a cost of $125 million. If even remotely true, that could well prove to be a much smarter investment than $20 billion in stimulus money. Heck, given how easily billions are being spent in Washington today, $125 million is pocket change.
Open source might prove to be the wrong answer to the health care mess. But given the VA's success with VistA, President Obama should be spending pennies on the stimulus dollar with VistA before he looks elsewhere for solutions. It's already written. By all accounts, it works well.
It just needs to shake the MUMPS out.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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?
IBM is crowing about its increase in Lotus Notes licenses to 145 million, up five million in the past year. That's nice, but I'm willing to bet that Microsoft could issue a similar press release, and probably could claim even more Notes/Domino emigrants to Exchange.
In fact, for the past few years Microsoft has been doing exactly that.
If one looks to neutral analysts to be the line judge in this discussion, the water becomes even murkier, as eWeek points out:
Market share estimates vary widely for Exchange and Lotus Notes. Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 shows Notes narrowing the gap on market leader Exchange, with IBM's Notes owning 40 percent share worldwide and Microsoft grabbing 48 percent for Exchange.
IDC's annual market share analysis of collaborative environments puts Microsoft's market share at 52 percent, with IBM's market share slipping 5 percent to 37.7 percent. A Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide found Exchange in 65 percent of those shops.
In the land of the big incumbent software vendors, it's really a matter of customer ping-pong, as SAP and Oracle's back-and-forth suggests, without significant market share gains at each other's expense.
When open-source Zimbra/Yahoo! claims to have gained five million licenses at either IBM's or Microsoft's expense, that will be real news, because it will represent real market share gains for a competitor. But this sort of PR from IBM? It's really just saying, "We nabbed five million seats from Microsoft while it was stealing five million from us."
Open-source email company Open-Xchange has raised a $9 million Series B round in a difficult financing environment, bringing its total funding to $17.8 million.
With this fresh infusion of cash Open-Xchange is expected to mount a more serious challenge to Microsoft's ubiquitous Exchange product. Open-Xchange claims 8.4 million paid mailboxes worldwide.
The real question for the company will be how to expand into enterprises. Most open-source software companies tend to infiltrate enterprises at the departmental level, proliferating from an initially small beachhead. Email, however, doesn't really work this way. Unlike an ECM or CRM system, it's tough to go off the company's Exchange or Domino grid to dally with Open-Xchange. It's a bit of an all-or-nothing approach.
This may work with SMB customers and in certain market segments (Education?), but it's a tough slog in large enterprises which may very well despise Exchange or Domino...but struggle to abandon either. It would be fascinating to hear how the company plans to use its cash to tackle the enterprise.
It will also be interesting to see how it fares against Zimbra. There was a possibility of Zimbra getting buried in the Yahoo! mess, but the opposite seems to have happened. Zimbra's business has accelerated within Yahoo!, making life a bit more difficult for Open-Xchange.
I'm a huge fan of Zimbra's slick email alternative to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, but I'll admit to being very impressed by Zarafa, a full Outlook/Exchange replacement with MAPI, Web access, iCal, and ActiveSync support. Zarafa recently became notable because the company open sourced its e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.
I spent some time with the Zarafa demo and assuming it administers as nicely as it operates for the end-user, it's a winner. Is it better than Zimbra? After all, Zimbra also has iCal, Web access, ActiveSync, etc.
It's hard to say, given that I wasn't able to put Zarafa through a full workload like I do with Zimbra each day in my work. I think the Zarafa interface is a bit cleaner than Zimbra's...
Zarafa's Web client (click to enlarge).
(Credit: Zarafa)...but one of my primary reasons for loving Zimbra is the Zimlet, making it super-easy to integrate Zimbra with third-party services and applications. (One of my solutions engineers integrated Alfresco with Zimbra in a week.) Zarafa? It is still an island of productivity, not an archipelago of connected islands like Zimbra.
Even so, it's good to see competition in this critical market segment. Despite all the hype around Twitter and other "Web 2.0" communication tools, e-mail is still the crux of enterprise communication. The more robust open-source e-mail alternatives to Exchange, the better. Welcome to the party, Zarafa.
I've been pining lately for greater enterprise participation in open source, following the lead set by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, and so was excited to see the recent news that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has joined the Linux Foundation. For CME, time is money, with a record 2.2 billion contracts in 2007 worth more than $1.2 quadrillion, all running on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in this case).
But what does CME get from joining the Linux Foundation?
By joining the Linux Foundation, CME Group will be able to collaborate with key Linux developer and vendors. CME Group's Vinod Kutty, associate director and head of distributed computing R&D, will become chair of the Linux Foundation's End User Council. The Council is a group of the largest Linux end users who use the forum to collaborate and educate themselves on technical, legal and community efforts.
In other words, CME wants to be both a producer and a consumer of open-source software, and specifically Linux in this case. CME has been a longstanding user of Linux, deriving considerable value from Red Hat Enterprise Linux since at least 2004. Now it's time to start giving something back.
Is Zimbra enterprise-ready? Yes, it is.
At least, that's the news from Stanford, which today announced that it is replacing its campus-wide email system with Zimbra. TechCrunch outs the competition on the deal, too: Google's Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.
This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in ".edu."
I use Zimbra on a daily basis and absolutely love it. I love it for some of the same reasons that Stanford chose Zimbra:
Zimbra was selected because the technology allows access to e-mail, calendar and contact lists from a single, unified web interface--enabling easy sharing of information among the various services, according to Ammy Hill, campus readiness specialist for IT Services. She added that Zimbra is an open-source, standards-based solution that works equally well on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.
It's that last bit that I particularly love. With Zimbra, no operating system is a second-class citizen. With more and more people switching to the Mac, this is particularly important. Who wants a Microsoft-centered existence that neglects those that haven't capitulated to Windows?
Sabeer Bhatia, one of the co-founders of Hotmail (bought by Microsoft for $400 million ten years ago), is on a mission to lobotomize Microsoft's $20 billion Office business. He has an uphill climb.
Bhatia is behind Live Documents, a web-based competitor to Microsoft Word, which purports to offer enterprises an upgrade path beyond the $400/seat offer from Microsoft. The question is, "Don't we already have Google Docs for this?"
Designed to help consumers avoid expensive upgrades and to foster collaboration on a secure internet platform, Live Documents matches features found in Office 2007, the most recent version. It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user. Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft?s licensed technology. Aricent, an Indian software services group with 6,700 employees, is the first client.
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