Unicon Announces Reseller Agreement with Zimbra to Provide Email & Calendar Products to Higher Education

October 4, 2006; 06:55 AM
Unicon, Inc., the leading independent provider of enterprise portals, applications, and professional services for the online campus in academic institutions, announced an agreement to resell the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (Network Edition) of email, calendar, and messaging products to the higher education market. Unicon will provide the Zimbra products to academic institutions via direct sales, as an ASP hosted service, and as a dedicated hosted solution. With educational discounts, Zimbra email and messaging has a very low Total Cost of Ownership for institutions and allows them to provide robust, feature-rich solution for their students and also generate branding awareness and advertising revenue from merchants locally and nationwide. Zimbra supports virtually all desktop environments including: Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.

Unicon will be demonstrating the Zimbra products at the upcoming EDUCAUSE Conference (Booth #1121) in Dallas, TX this October 9-12, 2006 and at the League for Innovation 2006 Conference on Information Technology (Booth #401) in Charlotte, NC on October 22-25, 2006.

“Zimbra’s powerful, AJAX-based user interface for administrators and end users provides a tremendous opportunity for institutions looking to provide enhanced communications for email, calendaring, and mobile technology to their ever-changing student, faculty and alumni populations,” stated John C. Blakley, CEO of Unicon, Inc. “Institutions can benefit from the powerful TCO advantage of Zimbra, the innovation of a modern messaging platform and the support for mobile devices and clients like Microsoft Outlook.”

“We welcome Unicon to the Zimbra partner community and are excited to work together to accelerate the adoption of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite to more educational institutions,” said Scott Dietzen, President and CTO. “Together, we enable educational institutions to quickly and cost effectively implement a modern messaging and collaboration solution that today’s universities require to support their digital lifestyle.”

Unicon Product/Service Offerings with Zimbra:

Direct Sales & Implementation: For this solution, Unicon would work with the institution to determine functional specification and integration needs, and then implement the Network edition of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite including email and calendaring as part of the institution’s Web portal and other online campus services.

ASP Hosted eMail solutions: Within this environment, Unicon provides a low cost, flexible, highly functional, hosted solution of the Network edition of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Unicon provides full System Administration and Technical Support for its customers in this environment. In addition, Unicon provides various tiers of storage and flexible setup configurations.

Dedicated Hosted eMail solution: This environment provides dedicated hardware for the installation of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite for our clients. Within the dedicated environment, clients can have complete control over the configuration without any limitations on the number of eMail boxes. Unicon provides optional system administration and customer support for either the Open-Source or Network Edition of the Zimbra solution.

Information About the Zimbra Collaboration Suite and Zimbra:

Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.0 is modern, innovative messaging and collaboration. Zimbra is the leading open source solution for enterprise, service provider, academic, and government environments; offering administrators and their end-users unmatched benefits. Ajax based collaboration is at the heart of ZCS 4.0. The powerful web client integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and now online document authoring and sharing. The unique Zimlet technology make it easy to include custom 'mash-ups' in ZCS. ZCS 4.0 also features an Ajax Admin Interface plus full scripting tools, and support for standards-based APIs (IMAP / POP / iCal) which enable seamless compatibility with Microsoft Outlook and Apple. Zimbra also offers Zimbra Mobile, the first integrated offering for open source with no need for third party software or additional servers for most devices. For more information about Zimbra, visit www.zimbra.com.

About Unicon

Unicon, Inc. is the leading independent provider of open-source frameworks, applications and professional services for the online campus. Unicon delivers enterprise portal, collaboration, learning, and integration technology for higher education institutions worldwide. Unicon is the leading commercial supporter of the uPortal open source Web portal initiative, and is a Sakai Commercial Affiliate for the community source Collaboration and Learning Environment. The company’s signature Academus® brand encompasses an Enterprise Portal, Web Content Management system, Collaboration Tools, and Learning Environments. Unicon strives to base its solutions on open-source technology for increased productivity and reduced costs. Unicon also provides a full complement of professional consulting, training and support services.

More information about Unicon, Inc. and Academus Open Campus is available at www.unicon.net & www.academusopencampus.com

Unicon and Academus are Registered Trademarks of Unicon, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.