Could e-mail platform unseat Microsoft?
mercurynews.com
By Matt Marshall
Mercury News
Posted on Mon, Nov. 07, 2005
If you're like a lot of people, you probably think your e-mail service is just fine, thank you very much.
But last month, a small San Mateo start-up called Zimbra launched a new e-mail platform with gee-whiz features -- and at a price low enough that it could steal some customers.
Zimbra elicited oohs and aahs from an audience of technologists at a San Francisco conference last month when its e-mail novelties were first unveiled. The excitement stems from Zimbra's visual fireworks, based on the latest Web technology.
This lets you do things like pull up Google maps by scrolling your mouse over an address written in the e-mail. It allows you to 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.
Sure, there is a long line of companies that have sought to knock Microsoft's Exchange e-mail platform off its perch. Most have failed; a few others have had minor traction.
But Gartner analyst David Mario Smith says Zimbra may succeed. ``It is pretty interesting,'' he said. ``Small, mid-sized companies might go for its lower-cost platform.''
Zimbra is built using open-source software, which means developers for other companies can access its software code and customize the e-mail technology with their own options. All kinds of features have already sprouted: You ``mouse'' over a phone number, and your Skype account will pop open for you to make a free Internet call. Or mouse over a purchase order number, and Zimbra will summarize its information, or if you mouse over a FedEx number, it can tell you where your package is.
Zimbra's product is compatible with Microsoft Outlook and other popular e-mail platforms, such as Apple Mail. Zimbra really runs the bulk of the e-mail service, making it a competitor to Microsoft's e-mail server offering, called Exchange. But Zimbra keeps the familiar ``front-end'' part of Microsoft's e-mail platform, which users interact with, called Outlook.
But while Zimbra claims e-mail is ``broken,'' many companies may still think it works well enough for them. Zimbra has some good-looking technology, but the trick will be in winning converts. Zimbra will also have to prove it has a security component that works well enough for big companies to be comfortable with. ``This remains to be seen,'' said Gartner's Smith.
A string of companies have so far failed to improve upon Microsoft. Ximian had an open-source e-mail product that could connect with Exchange servers, and was popular with some open-source fans, but didn't take off in a big way. There is Scalix, which was launched with great fanfare two years ago, but has also not made great headway. There is Mitch Kapor's Chandler project, which has also failed to see widespread adoption.
Zimbra hopes to wage a grass-roots campaign: winning individual converts, some within big companies, who then spread the word to corporate information technology officers, persuading them to adopt Zimbra, too.
Zimbra's product is a test version, but it hopes to release a version ready for big companies within a few months, says Chief Executive Satish Dharmaraj. He and his team of 35 -- most of them engineers -- hope to make it as secure as Microsoft and easy to install on computers.
It wants to undercut Microsoft, which can charge up to $150 per user for companies that want all the bells and whistles -- from support to security and more.
But Zimbra is offering its product for $30 per user.
Several other features show off Zimbra's graphics technology. One is a flight tracker service. You scroll over a flight number, and up pops a map with a pin for where the plane is.
Zimbra lets you overlap your calendar with the calendar of your colleagues -- in case you want to coordinate meetings. And if you want to change a meeting day from within the calendar, Zimbra lets you drag and drop the entry -- without having to type the different day.
The technology behind these features is called AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Basically, this allows much more information from a company's corporate server to be stored within a browser, allowing for swifter operations, for example, of the drag-and-drop kind.
Dharmaraj started the company in late 2003, along with co-founders Ross Dargahi and Roland Schemers. He then worked on Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer at BEA Systems, to join the team. Dietzen hedged for a while, but finally joined this year.
Dharmaraj and his management team decided to work in cubicles at the center of their office, and give engineers the more spacious individual office rooms.
Dietzen said he had become frustrated with having to spend up to four hours a day plowing through e-mail at BEA. As liaison between BEA's customers and his engineers, he had to painstakingly cut, paste and forward e-mails. But with 600 folders, he often got lost trying to find crucial correspondence.
A clinching moment came while sitting in a hotel room in Paris, and his e-mail load made him miss dinner. Since he started to use Zimbra, he says, ``I'm at least 30 percent more productive.''
Rather than locking e-mail into certain folders, Zimbra lets you cross-reference them with subject tags, so e-mails can be searched in multiple ways. Zimbra's e-mail search also looks beyond single folders, Dietzen explains.
The service was released in early October, and within four weeks, the code has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Chinese Russian and Dutch.
CEO Dharmaraj says 90 percent of downloads are made by people who plan to use the company's software under an open-source license, and thus won't make the company any money. But the other 10 percent are from bigger companies, such as large service providers, who Dharmaraj says are already inquiring about how to get Zimbra's pending ``enterprise,'' or corporate, version. Dharmaraj hopes big companies will sign up for Zimbra and request support and other services.
To gain credibility and staying power, Zimbra also decided to take plenty of venture capital early on. The company raised $16 million from Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Partners and individuals including Eric Hahn. Hahn is known for having launched other message companies, including Outlook-search company Lookout Software, acquired by Microsoft last year. |
