VentureBeat

Zimbra , the nifty messaging software owned by Yahoo, has unveiled the latest iteration of its collaboration features, and it’s impressive.

Zimbra, you’ll recall, arrived on the scene four years ago and wowed people with a Web service that uses AJAX technology to let you switch seamlessly between your mail, calendar and contacts – for example popping up maps automatically if you scrolled over an address in email, or allowing you to make a phone call if you clicked on a number within the email. The San Mateo, Calif. company got snapped up by Yahoo for $350 million last year. For me, Zimbra’s presentation at the Web 2.0 conference was my big aha moment on the power of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. But it has remained obscure until now, because it has worked mainly through third parties and businesses and hasn’t targeted consumers directly.

Now Zimbra’s future hangs in balance, given that its a competitor to Microsoft’s Outlook Exchange. If Micrsoft pulls off its acquisition of Yahoo, the software giant may or may not put Zimbra on the chopping block. If consumers have a say, though, Microsoft should leave Zimbra alone. Zimbra pushes collaboration features a lot further than Microsoft’s offerings and does so for a very low cost — not so good for Microsoft.

Zimbra’s Scott Dietzen walked me through the latest release, which he said is Zimbra’s most significant so far. Called the Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0, it extends Zimbra access across most desktop operating systems and for the first time supports Blackberry.

It offers three new features: a new IM feature, a way to drag and drop anything on your desktop directly into your Zimbra application, and — most compelling of all — a Zimbra desktop application.

With IM, your IM box sits on top of your application, and you can IM while composing email. But Zimbra’s IM supports calls to other IM clients, including Yahoo Messenger, and the IM clients of Microsoft, Google and AOL. It uses the messaging and presence protocol XMPP with a Zimbra interface. The IM lets you see your voicemail and provides a way to click on a contact to call. It runs on Zimbra servers, but since Zimbra is open source and open standards, it offers you a gateway so that it works on Outlook, for example.

The drag-and-drop feature, called Zimbra Briefcase, lets you drag and drop any document on your desktop into your Zimbra application on the browser – and that document is then stored and indexed on Zimbra’s servers so it’s available to be accessed anywhere.

Zimbra supports this integrated desktop feature on Apple, Windows and Linux, and supports Safari, Firefox and IE browsers. We’re not aware of another integrated desktop application that does this.

Meanwhile, Zimbra’s application lets you share documents with other users from a popup box within the browser. While competitor Microsoft has bundled its Sharepoint software into its Outlook Exchange product to let you share documents from within Exchange, Zimbra’s sharing takes place within the same application, so it’s more seamless in mashing up with other applications, such as Yahoo properties. You can email yourself photos from your Flickr account, for example.

The Zimbra desktop is an install and can run on all Macs, Linux or Windows machines. A mini Zimbra server tracks your mailbox, so sophisticated search and other mashups all happen on your desktop as if you were on the Web. A Zimbra server on the back-end talks with local javascript code that manages your mailbox. Any POP or IMAP-supported server can be synced with the Zimbra client. This means Zimbra can reach folks who have never used it before because they didn’t have a Zimbra server. It lets you sync it with an Outlook Exchange server and continue to use Zimbra’s features within Outlook.

And all this, for free — at least, the open source version. The commercially supported edition is available for a 60-day free trial on the Zimbra Website.

In sum, the new features include:

• Native email, contacts, calendar, and task synchronization from Zimbra to Outlook 2007
• Access Zimbra on all BlackBerry handsets, J2ME enabled devices, or any mobile web browser, including the Apple iPhone
• Zimbra Tasks monitor start and due dates, priority, progress, and percent completion of tasks
• Built directly into ZCS, Web-based Instant Messaging supports multiple conversations and group chats
• Conveniently store any file from an email in Zimbra Briefcase instead of as an email attachment; easily share Briefcase folders with others
• Work online or offline with Zimbra Desktop, the AJAX experience for Zimbra users and users of existing POP and IMAP email servers
• Share inboxes and email folders with others, including the ability to provide read-only access or allow others to completely manage
• Fifteen fully certified languages ship within ZCS for end-users to choose
• New Zimlets that “mash-up” Flickr, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Search in Zimbra Collaboration Suite

 Zimba says more than 300 new universities have adopted its software in the past year.

In ten years, an internet eternity, web-based email has only made token improvements, moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Meanwhile, instant messaging and social networks have rapidly developed.

Four new startups, all of which came out of secrecy this year, point toward a bright new future for email. These oddly-named saviors — Fuser, Orgoo, Xobni and Xoopit — have a simple goal. They want to centralize communication, and they want to give it structure and meaning.

Power users feel the pain of having to repeatedly switch between email and the address book, having to close one email before writing another, or losing track of instant messages as the write a new email. For lighter email users, only once email begins to stack up and conversations become lost or forgotten do their cries for help begin. The least committed email users may have dropped it entirely in favor of messaging on a platform like Facebook, which seems to offer many of the same basic features.

The individual aims of these companies differ. Fuser and Orgoo (previous coverage) both centralize communication, whether from email, instant messaging, a social network or even mobile SMS and video, in one simple interface. Xobni (previous coverage) is an overlay for Outlook that helps organize high-volume communications with a multi-functional sidebar. Xoopit organizes all those thousands of pages of archived email, pulling out meaningful content long since lost by the user.

While each is different, they recognize the same disease, and offer the same cures. To use the wording of Sean Rad, co-founder of Orgoo, the aim is to first aggregate all communication; next, integrate the separate streams into a single work flow; and finally, organize, to increase the efficiency and usefulness of email.

We’ll give a summary of each startup, followed by some thoughts from their top executives as to what’s in the future.

Fuser
Fuser pulls together its user’s communications, both from all of their email accounts as well as the social networks Facebook and MySpace. It then places the message-centers of each service in a single web based interface, providing a central place to catch up on what’s been happening everywhere.

According to the company’s president, Jeff Herman, “The problem is that most people today have multiple email, social networking accounts and so forth. You have to log in to five or six places to find out what’s going on. What we’re really going for is a virtual command center to pull together everything a person has.”

Orgoo
Orgoo, like Fuser, aggregates communication, but with an interface that more closely resembles traditional email. And while both Fuser and Orgoo can access any type of email account, Orgoo adds in instant messaging accounts rather than social networks, and also has a video chat option.

“As things stand, you have different accounts on all these services. If I email you, we continue our conversation by IM or phone. But I don’t have one single view of that conversation. We’ve taken the first step of integrating and allowing you to organize in one central location,” says Rad.

Both Fuser and Orgoo plan to add, as quickly as possible, features that the other has — Fuser will add instant messaging, while Orgoo will add social networking. Where the two companies differ is in their interface (see screenshots) and their target markets; Herman says that Fuser is aiming for the “middle American” market, while Orgoo seems to appeal to a more tech-savvy crowd.

Xobni
Xobni attempts to help information-overloaded business people keep track of their contacts within Microsoft Outlook. A sidebar view shows the relationship of a message’s sender to the user, as well as a correspondence history, their contact information, and files exchanged — all without ever opening a single email, much less tracking through endless folders and conversational threads.

Despite some initial problems with the software’s implementation, with users complaining of excessive memory usage, co-founder Matt Brezina says demand has been strong from heckled Outlook users. “We decided to stick to Outlook because there’s a lot of pain there, and a lot of value that can be created for those users,”Brezina says.

Xoopit
To Xoopit, the email inbox is a library in lack of the Dewey Decimal System. While co-founder Bijan Marashi is guarded in his statements about the company, which will come out of stealth mode later this year, he told us that the purpose of Xoopit is simply to organize email.

For example, Xoopit can search through every email ever sent to a user and pull out and compile a photo gallery from the attachments. Other content in emails can also be separated out. The idea is to make even old emails and content available without requiring hours of digging, much like separating a single towering stack of documents into organized filing cabinets.

The future

The question is, just how painful is existing consumer email? The majority of us are lazy, and we’ll put up with a lot before learning a new system. Sure, our Yahoo Mail may be clunky at times, but it’s “good enough,” right? If they only appeal to a tiny sub-set of users, all four startups are doomed to failure.

However, there are examples of innovation in email paying off. When Zimbra, an enterprise email client, launched in 2005, we admit to doubting that it could challenge Outlook. It took two years, but the Ajax-based software took off, gaining enough momentum among users excited about its extensible features and add-ons to convince Yahoo to acquire it for $350 million, earlier this year. However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use, nor is it a standard web mail client like Yahoo or Google offers.

The lesson is that to have a chance, new email startups must be easy to use, and address multiple needs effectively. To become the command center for any internet user, email should go further, pulling together communication and making them more intuitive, and more useful.

Rad says that Orgoo’s goal is to make a user’s past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to “allow people to explose the hidden social networks and the hidden information,” Rad says. “We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That’s good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context.”

Likewise, Fuser wants to dig into the wealth of information flowing through user’s accounts. While the site already features a “leaderboard” showing who users communicate with most on their social networks, it could gather more information, for instance keeping track of a friend even when she has different accounts as well. More such features are planned, but Herman also points to another important area for his company. “We’re aimed at middle America, where people are not technologists,” he says. “If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”

Xobni’s co-founder Brezina says his company doesn’t plan on resting on its Outlook laurels, and may branch out to a high-powered web mail or a client that can, like Zimbra, act as a platform for developers, for example being able to automatically look up real estate prices and connect them information in an agent’s email. And like the other companies, Brezina thinks that email is a rich information resource about a person’s life. While Xobni already pulls out some information like phone numbers from email, there’s much more information waiting for someone to find an innovative way to highlight. “There’s a structure that just hasn’t been broken apart and exposed,” he says.

And when will a Google or Yahoo decide to change their own platforms? Xoopit founder Bijan Marashi compares the challenge of changing email to upgrading an operation system: “That’s a major overhaul of stuff consumers use every day, and the [OS] companies pull it off. If someone can really make this stuff simple, the majors might be able to take a lot of it away.”

Adoption or acquisition by a big company may be the best way for any of the four to succeed, providing them with the money and backing to spread their word.

We’ll follow these startups as they evolve. More this week, on related projects coming out of the Web 2.0 conference.

Yahoo is set to announce the acquisition of open-source email provider Zimbra, a company that has made headway providing services for other big companies such as Comcast. The news was first reported by AllthingsD, but there was no price mentioned. It’s rumored to be $350 million, according to Techcrunch.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra’s clients include ISPs and a number of colleges. It was backed with $30.5 million in three rounds from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Partners, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich.

The great thing about Zimbra is its flexibility (see past coverage). Its Ajax interface allows nimble switching between calendars, contacts and other features, including mashups so that addresses within emails can pop up as Google maps — although those who have used the service say the user experience is mixed. It kept promising a consumer version, but until now hasn’t delivered it, thus limiting its popularity.

Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures, in particular made a killing. They each owned a quarter of the company after investing about $9 million, the firms told Dow Jones.  They each receive roughly $90 million with this deal, giving them a ten-fold return in four years.

This is the latest result that helps Redpoint redeem itself. The company launched with great fanfare near the top of the bubble in 2000, but didn’t produce anything until about a year ago.

Accel invested later, in a $15 million second round in 2005 and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Inventures Group and Presidio STX invested as part of a $14.5 million third round last year.

Zimbra, the fast-growing email and calendar service, has released a mobile version specifically for the iPhone.

Here’s information on the player, called the iZimbra. The link will work until about 10am today, when the company will make its announcement.

iZimbra will allow users to get their address books, e-mail, and calendars where ever they are, without the need for iSync or Outlook connectors — because it runs from the Zimbra server. The download works over the air, either by WIFI or EDGE. You point the iPhone to your Zimbra server via Safari.

If you select an address, the Google Maps application will display the address. If you click on a phone number, the iPhone will dial the contact’s number.

We last wrote about Zimbra, of San Mateo, Calif., here. Zimbra’s strength is its nimble AJAX interface, letting you switch seamlessly between your address book, calendar and email. It has so far delivering its application to businesses and to individuals through ISP providers, such as Comcast. However, it will be delivering a consumer version shortly, which will allow you to get the service directly from Zimbra.

Zimbra, the open-source messaging software company that offers more modern features than Microsoft’s Outlook, has cut a major deal with Comcast, keeping it on an impressive trend of growth.

It benefits Comcast because it lets the cable giant give its customers a messaging platform — the idea being it will stem the defection of customers to services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Zimbra’s messaging system is in some ways more sophisticated that the email systems provided by Microsoft Outlook, MSN, Google or Yahoo Mail. It works both offline and online. Zimbra’s AJAX and other features make it easy to do things like scroll over an address and have a map pop up, and to switch seamlessly to your contacts and calendar without leaving your email. We covered it here. Zimbra’s chief executive Satish Dharmaraj tells VentureBeat a consumer version of Zimbra will be out sometime this summer (meaning, you’ll be able to get it directly from Zimbra, instead going through a service provider).

As part of the deal with Comcast, Zimbra will help it operate a so-called “SmartZone” communications center (see screenshot below). There, customers can get email, check voicemail online, send instant messages and manage their address book.

It will roll out later this year, and offer the following:

o “visual” voice mail — You can listen to your voicemails online and forward voice mail messages via email to anyone. Customers can also view, save and print call history. Customers can also manage calling features such as call forwarding, do not disturb and voice mail playback options.
o an address book that synchronizes with and is accessible from other Web-connected devices.
o instant messaging and video instant messages.
o other features like weather, news reports and video clips.

Plaxo, another company, will be offering components of the address book.

Zimbra has now signed deals with more than a hundred hosting providers.

/

Adobe and others continue to roll out new software iterations, all challenging Microsoft’s dominance of popular consumer software.

Adobe recently released Apollo, a software that lets developers create Web applications that work online and offline on your desktop. Today, Adobe also releases Creative Suite, which bridges the gap between Adobe’s design software, such as image editor Photoshop and Illustrator, and its Web-development tools like Flash and Dreamweaver. (See announcement here).

The new features allow designers to manipulate video images frame by frame inside Photoshop, for example. A new product called Device Central allows developers to test their programs on virtual versions of 200 mobile phones and devices — over their computer screens. (See Mercury News review here)

Meanwhile, another company, Joyent, of San Anselmo, Calif., has released Slingshot, a platform that, like Adobe’s Apollo, lets people build sophisticated applications that work online and offline on your desktop. Slingshot supports Rails developers. A Slingshot application on your desktop will function just like the Web version, and sync automatically once you access the Web. This is another way to bypass the Web browser. These Slingshot apps let you drag and drop files from one application to and from other apps on your desktop. It is like Microsoft Office/Outlook, though better: If you’re using someone else’s computer, you can access the Web version, and it provides a better experience than say, Microsoft’s web version (if you’ve tried Microsoft’s Web email offering, Webmail, it is clunky). More details here, and screencast here. The LA Times and several other companies are already using Joyent’s service for their applications. Joyent itself offers Web apps that exploit this, including for email, calendaring and contacts.

Meanwhile, Zimbra, another messaging company, has just released its own version of software that works offline.

Zimbra, the San Mateo open-source messaging software start-up that has been on a roll lately, now lets you work with it offline.

Among companies offering AJAX technology for email/office products — which let you do cool useful things like scroll over an address and have a map pop up, and switch seamlessly to your contacts and calendar — Zimbra is the first to be available both online and offline, to our knowledge. Google has said it will make its products available offline, but hasn’t followed through yet.

It lets you use your browser offline, and includes the ability to search and organize, respond to emails, etc. Once you get online again, your emails are sent. Until now, people using Zimbra offline would have to switch back to their basic Outlook, and then switch back to Zimbra when they came online again.

Both POP accounts and RSS feed folders are synced to, which is useful, and makes us want to get the product when the consumer version is out by the end of the year — to be downloadable from the site.

Updated

Zimbra, the open source messaging software company, has just announced that it has sold four million Zimbra mailboxes, an impressive milestone for the three year old San Mateo company.

Zimbra, you’ll recall, gives you an email platform that implements the latest AJAX majic. It started last year by letting you do things like pull up Google maps by scrolling your mouse over an address written in the e-mail, or pop up your calendar when you mouse over a date in an e-mail, or a day of the week — avoiding the need to clunkily switch back and forth from your e-mail and your calendar.

It is one thing to look good, quite another to execute. Since then, it has come out with Zimlets, which let developers do even more. This has proven unexpectedly popular with Internet service providers, Satish Dharmaraj told us today. “I can’t believe what we sold this quarter,” he said. He wouldn’t provide revenue numbers.

He said service providers are hosting Zimbra’s email service for individuals and small and medium sized companies.

The providers like Zimbra because it is “skinnable,” meaning it can be tailored for a consumer feel, or for a business feel. Service providers can choose to monetize the email service by running Google Adwords or Adsense, for example. Zimbra gives them a way to make a cut if a user clicks an ad from within their email to buy an iTunes song for 99 cents, or a book from Amazon. Like Gmail, Zimbra indexes every word within an email, and so knows what is being written, and can offer relevant advertising or other services — depending on what the service provider wants.

Before and after Zimbra’s launch, there have been numerous companies seeking to improve on Microsoft or other email services.

Zimbra’s product is compatible with Microsoft Outlook and other popular e-mail platforms, such as Apple Mail. Zimbra really runs the back-end of the e-mail service, making it a competitor to Microsoft’s e-mail server offering, called Exchange. But Zimbra can keep the familiar “front-end” part of Microsoft’s e-mail platform, which users interact with, called Outlook.

Zimbra has been selling its high-end “enterprise” mailboxes at $28 a pop, but these are meant to compete with Exchange and have the bells and whistles. Most of Zimbra’s uptake has come through service providers serving individuals, however. Those service providers can have up to 20 million users, and Zimbra gives them a major discount based on volume. (In other words, you can’t multiply 4 million by $28 to get Zimbra’s revenue; not even close.)

Besides service providers, Zimbra adopters have included dozens of universities and other companies, such as Digg.com and Times of India (the announcement lists many more). As noted before, Zimbra has raised at least $30 million from Benchmark, Accel, Redpoint and others over three rounds.

(Editor’s note: Silicon Valley techies have argued before that Microsoft’s days of dominance are numbered, as open source and other cheaper software make headway. Satish Dharmaraj, of open source messaging company Zimbra, writes that Microsoft’s most recent efforts, with Office Live and Windows Live, aren’t going to help. Don’t worry, we’ll get Microsoft’s views on this later.)

There is a massive shift going on in our industry and its transforming the way money flows through the value chain in the computer industry. Scott McNealy predicted the era of network computers and Larry Ellison quickly followed up with a spin off to pursue that vision. However, timing is everything - they were both at least 10 years too early. Today everything from photos to music including all data and applications for both consumers and businesses are available at some URL. As this evolves further - the only thing relevant on a desktop is a browser, the memory and the CPU on the desktop. More importantly - what is completely irrelevant are applications on the desktop, disks and the operating system that the desktop is running.

Obviously, the company that will be most impacted because of this shift will be Microsoft. Over years, the desktop operating system - windows vista or otherwise - will become largely swappable. While creative designers and massive data crunchers (Like CFOs) might require a heavy operating system and fat applications - most other people (like all consumers and most employees in a business) will be more than happy with a thin client - that is a whole lot cheaper to maintain (not to buy). A consumer can manipulate their mail, music, photos, videos and rich applications - all via the browser. And you can use any thin client to get to all your data - be it your documents on the web (including word, slideshows and spreadsheet like documents) or your personal contacts. MSN, GOOG and Yahoo hope that its their portal and their account password that is the key to all your data. This so-called search war is not about search but about being the place where you and I store our data. With GCAL, GMAIL, the acquisition of Writely and introduction of the GOOG spreadsheet - Google has made several clear strategic moves to own a users data rather than just index the Internet.

Obviously MSFT’s much hyped Office Live and Windows Live services are Redmond’s way of dealing with this shift in application delivery and access models. They will have a challenging time with these because its so unintuitive to their traditional enterprise sales business culture and because the application infrastructure needed to support such services is dramatically different than traditional fat desktop applications that Microsoft excels at. Yahoo! has a large suite of apps that is much better integrated and a good momentum lead on the Internet but Google has the lethal combination of a cash cow that generates R&D budgets one could only dream of combined with an intellectual power that is envious. Although Google is coming from behind, having that much recurring revenue and IQ in a shifting market will keep everyone else chasing them. To compete in this new era of web delivered applications, a radical shift in architecture and an even more radical shift in business model is needed. Will the traditional desktop application companies cannibalize their own revenue and architecture to place a bet on the future? If they don’t, someone else will :-).