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."
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."
Red Hat offering "open" IBM Lotus Domino
(Credit: Red Hat)Ah, how the mighty have fallen. In what must have been gross oversight, Red Hat is pitching proprietary software on its website under the banner of "No vendor lock-in." The way Red Hat and IBM make it appear, simply running one's software on an open platform like Linux magically removes the proprietary lock-in of the application.
I hate to say this, Red Hat, but it just doesn't work that way. Last time I checked, IBM's Lotus Domino is proprietary software and running it on Linux hasn't changed that fact.
If it did, we'd be calling Microsoft Office open source (Hey, it runs on Linux via WINE) and a whole host of other things "open" and "lock-in free."
Red Hat's positioning of IBM's software on its site is oddly out of character with the open-source leader:
... Read moreIBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not "free" as in open source, but rather as in "Please take since people won't pay for it," as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.
The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft's territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM's collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn't first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won't.
A much better route would be to a) extend from Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn't own, as Google has.
If I were a betting man, I'd lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don't mean it's widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla's new email push.
... Read moreOpen-Xchange has announced the Domino20X tool to enable easy migration from IBM's Lotus/Domino to the open-source messaging and collaboration program, Open-Xchange. With all due respect to IBM, Lotus/Domino is (or was - I haven't had to use it since 2001) a (very) heavy messaging system that feels very Big Company and 1980s. Maybe it has become better since I last used it. For anyone other than a 100,000-person enterprise, however, migration may well be on the cards:
Open-Xchange and Pavone have developed a tool, Domino20X, to make it easier for administrators to convert from IBM's Lotus/Domino to the open source Open-Xchange groupware server. The tool, which has been developed as part of a technical collaboration between the two companies, extracts user data, e-mails, contacts, calendar entries and tasks from Domino servers (from version 7) and feeds it into Open-Xchange Server 5.
This is a good move for an open-source company. Make migration simple or, at least, simpler, as enterprise software is rarely simple. Kudos to the Open-Xchange team.
I've always liked Jive Software. My company, Alfresco, is used in conjunction with Jive's products in a range of accounts, and so I've had the chance to talk directly with Jive's customers. They all say the same thing: Jive's "lightweight" collaboration provides heavy-duty benefits at a significant cost advantage.
Now Jive is getting $15 million from Sequoia to expand and grow its business. It couldn't have come at a better time.
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