SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Zimbra, the leader in open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging software, today announced that it has more than four million paid Zimbra mailboxes globally through onsite deployments and its hosted partner program. More than 1,000 enterprises and organizations have deployed Zimbra across all industry segments, including financial services, healthcare, government and education. Additionally, millions of more users have implemented the Zimbra open source edition and there are more than 4,500 developers and administrators actively participating in the Zimbra Community.

"The momentous worldwide growth we have experienced since launching a year ago is a clear indication that the market is ready for a collaboration alternative with a strong foundation in innovation and open source," said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra CEO and co-founder. "We built the ZCS to meet the needs of both on-premise and on-demand deployments, and we continue to see tremendous uptake across the board, from on-premise customers and from partners that leverage Zimbra as a hosted service."

New customers and partners such as Digg.com and Singlefin join established customers and partners such as tax services provider H&R Block, real estate brokerage firm ZipRealty, IT consulting firm Exigent Technologies, Internet service provider Homestead and hosting service provider Amicus.

"Zimbra's flexibility makes it a great partner. It enables service providers to deploy different tiers of services at different prices, depending on their customers' needs," said Jake Jacoby, president, Singlefin. "We have achieved a remarkably lower TCO using Zimbra, because all of our users can leverage a single infrastructure and we have seen dramatic improvements in our ability to sell premium services."

Industry Partnerships Help to Fuel Growth

Zimbra has added new strategic partnerships and expanded its relationship with technology leaders such as Mozilla, RedHat and Jive Software. Additionally, many open source companies and projects serve key roles in the ZCS and greater Zimbra ecosystem, including Apache, ClamAV, Debian Linux, MySQL, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Sleepycat, SpamAssassin, SUSE Linux and Ubuntu. In early 2006, Zimbra co-founded and launched the OpenAJAX alliance with industry leaders BEA, Google, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo! and Zend.

Unique End-User and Administrator Benefits

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) provides a unique set of end-user and administrator benefits that make it a flexible solution for deployments of all sizes, from SMBs, to multi-thousand seat enterprises, to service providers with one million plus customers. Key features include next-generation email; shared calendaring; Web document authoring and sharing; "over the air" synchronization to a wide range of mobile devices; VoIP integration; and compatibility with Microsoft Outlook, Apple and Linux desktops. The ZCS server is available for popular operating systems: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mac OS X, Debian and SUSE Linux.

"Zimbra meets the complex needs of a financial services company by providing strong support for different desktop users and powerful over the air mobility support that does not require additional third party license or server costs," said Lennin Tabora, Research & Infrastructure Chief, Banco Promerica. "Zimbra Documents allows us to create and share vital content such as documents and spreadsheets within the browser, without ever having to download files or install a desktop application suite. Zimbra enables us to unchain the desktop from Microsoft."

Recent Small Business and Enterprise Customer Deployments Include: -- Digg -- FON (Spain) -- Grendene (Brazil) -- And more ... Recent Education Deployments Include: -- University of Alabama - Birmingham -- University of Hawaii -- University of Bern (Switzerland) -- And more ... New Service Provider and Portal Partners Include: -- Simply Mail Solutions (UK) -- Singlefin -- Razorstream -- And more ... Recent VAR partners Include: -- Seacom (Italy) -- CommGate (Singapore) -- ELOSI (France) -- And more ... Pricing and Availability

The ZCS 4.0 Open Source Edition is free. The commercially-supported ZCS Network Edition is available for a 60-day free trial on the Zimbra Website. ZCS 4.0 Network Edition pricing starts at $25/mailbox/year for a minimum of 25 users for the Standard Edition, which includes product support as well as software subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. Additional discounts are available for larger organizations. ZCS is available on-premise or as a hosted service; for information about Zimbra On-Demand or Zimbra's hosting partner program, please visit http://www.zimbra.com/partners/. Users can discuss topics related to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite and provide feedback at http://www.zimbra.com/forums/.

About Zimbra

Zimbra dramatically improves the messaging and collaboration experience for administrators and users. Zimbra achieves this by investing in innovation, open source, and compatibility with existing applications and systems. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite supports Windows, Apple, and Linux platforms and works with Microsoft Outlook as well as other PC and mobile clients. Additionally, Zimbra provides an AJAX browser based client that delivers rich, secure, anytime access for anyone within the enterprise. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite was voted Best Enterprise Project in the inaugural 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards and received a SIIA Codie award for Best Communication or Collaboration Solution. More information and software downloads are available at http://www.zimbra.com/.

Zimbra is a trademark of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.

CONTACT: Liz Clinkenbeard of OutCast Communications, +1-415-392-8282 or
liz@outcastpr.com, for Zimbra, Inc.

Web site: http://www.zimbra.com/