AJAX Pioneer Zimbra Launches On-Demand Partner Program

April 5, 2006; 02:10 AM
SAN MATEO, Calif., April 3 -- Zimbra ( http://www.zimbra.com ), a leader in open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging, today announced that its flagship Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is now available on-demand through a worldwide partner program for Hosted Service Providers (HSPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Through Hosted Zimbra(TM), small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and other companies that prefer not to host their own collaboration servers have access to the benefits of ZCS including online and offline support for Microsoft Outlook, Zimbra's rich Web 2.0 user interface, advanced calendaring capabilities, powerful search features and modern collaboration tools such as RSS.
"From day one, we designed ZCS to meet the needs of customers and partners who wanted it as a hosted service, and in the past few months we've had hundreds of potential partners contact us about providing hosted Zimbra to their customers, said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra CEO and co-founder. "Today we're thrilled to announce a great group of Zimbra hosting providers who specialize in specific business verticals or geographic territories, and who are bringing Zimbra to more businesses worldwide."
GreatCall, a wireless phone service provider that recently switched to Hosted Zimbra, is a customer of MindCentric, a Zimbra hosting partner based in Southern California. "We are very excited to be moving from Exchange to Zimbra. Zimbra is very well thought out with advanced functionality that will make us much more productive. It is a great experience for both end-users and administrators. Plus, the Outlook connector makes the change seamless for all our Windows users," said Dean Williams, VP of engineering at GreatCall. Zimbra's initial HSP partners include ABLE Incorporated, Amicus, Contegix, Edgewood Associates, Maccius, MindCentric, RSAWeb, San Mateo Regional Networks, Senokian, Smedia, Voxel dot net, and ZiOffice. A full list of Hosted Zimbra providers is available on Zimbra's Web site.
"We've been looking for the ideal partner to provide the best collaboration offering to the financial services community," said Marshall Huwe, CEO of Amicus, Inc., in Austin, TX. "Zimbra has allowed us to easily offer archiving, compliance and other critical capabilities required by the financial services community." "As a managed hosting company, our business customers expect us to offer best-of-class services in a fully managed and secure environment," said Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix, a managed-hosting provider in St. Louis, MO. "Zimbra allows us to do this with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which provides an innovative, cost-effective solution for email, calendaring and other services for our customers."
Unlike other leading collaboration solutions, the ZCS was designed from the ground up to be offered as a hosted and on-premise service. Key benefits for hosting partners include:

-- Native support for multiple tenants on each server
-- Delegated administration capabilities for each customer
-- Support of asynchronous and offline modes for Microsoft Outlook
-- Rich Web 2.0/Ajax user interface for end-users
-- Support for a broad range of email clients and mobile devices
-- Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
-- High end-user productivity
-- Strong Internet-based security (SSL/TLS for all protocols)
-- Extensibility via Zimlets and Web services for creating enterprise mash-ups

For more information on Hosted Zimbra, including pricing and availability, please visit http://www.zimbra.com/partners/zimbra_hosting.html . For details on Zimbra's Hosted Partner program, please visit http://www.zimbra.com/partners/hosting_partners.html .
Additionally, the ZCS 3.0 free Open Source Edition and commercially-supported Network Edition are both available for download at http://www.zimbra.com. Users can discuss topics related to the ZCS and Zimbra as a hosted service at http://www.zimbra.com/forums/.

About Zimbra:
Zimbra dramatically improves the messaging and collaboration experience for administrators and users. Zimbra's goal is to achieve 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. More information and software downloads are available at http://www.zimbra.com.