The story of Zimbra

November 7, 2005 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

Updated

zimbra[1].1.ktb.102605.JPGHere’s our Mercury News story about Zimbra, the San Mateo start-up that is taking on Microsoft with its new open-source AJAX-filled email platform. We mentioned them earlier here, but this latest story goes a bit deeper.

Zimbra has a free version for individuals who don’t want to make money from it, but…

its main purpose is to sell to large companies that are already using competing products such as Microsoft.

One thing we didn’t mention, for lack of space, is the attention chief executive Satish Dharmaraj (he is on left, in this picture; click to enlarge) took to choosing his investors. Every one of them has experience in open-source or selling to big companies (enterprise). These investors have backed big-name open-source companies Redhat, MySQL and JBoss — a decent roster for any company trying to succeed in open-source.

(Photo by Karen T. Borchers — Mercury News)

Update: Included link to Merc story

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • AJAX is certainly hot these days and a necessary focus area for many solution providers such as ours. A recent (and excellent) CIBC Web 2.0 Conference review noted that "the advances in AJAX development and increased adoption of AJAX-coded services should fuel further innovation behind strong demand. All this points to a deeper network-oriented user experience. The ability to run applications that are customized and personalized to a user's history and needs, all the while dynamically updating with system upgrades, should eventually allow for little differentiation between web-based applications and client-based applications. It appears to us that the next leg of innovation along these lines will involve the user�s ability to interact with these web-based applications offline (e.g., on an airplane)."

    The plethora of development tools that are (or soon will be) available will certainly help the development community. Start-ups to stalwarts are rushing to be in play: Tools are sprouting from many corners, from Microsoft, Sun and TIBCO to JackBe and Backbase. A breath of fresh air for solution providers, especially those of us in the offshoring sector. (We're one of China's largest providers.)

    For further info, see doiop.com/ajax_infoworld_cover , doiop.com/ajax_infoworld_editorial (same issue), and doiop.com/ajax_computerworld (a Computerworld Quick Study).
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