iiNet moves customer mail to Zimbra cloud

Virtualisation and cloud services provider VMware and mail platform subsidiary Zimbra have today announced a deal to consolidate the email of Australia's third largest internet service provider (ISP), iiNet, into a single cloud-based platform.

iiNet has agreed to purchase over 1 million Zimbra mailboxes and will migrate all customers with iiNet mailboxes onto the Zimbra platform between October 2010 and January 2011.

Following a spate of recent acquisitions, including Westnet, Netspace and most recently AAPT, there was a need to consolidate the various different mail platforms being used across the business, iiNet chief technology officer Greg Bader said.

"iiNet's goal has been to not only consolidate our various email systems, but to provide our customers with a solution that's both user-friendly and comes with all the extra bells and whistles," Bader said in a statement.

"Zimbra's offering is ideal because, without our customers having to lift a finger, they're about to get a simple-to-use email service that's really ahead of the curve in terms of technology."

Approximately 25 per cent of iiNet's customers were already using Zimbra services and the ISP already utilises Zimbra for its hosted business email. The company also uses VMware's View virtualisation services for iiNet's call centre desktops.

"This landmark deal expands our strong relationship with iiNet beyond the virtualisation of its IT infrastructure to providing flexible enterprise-class email and collaboration solutions that will directly impact iiNet's customers," VMware Australia and New Zealand managing director Paul Harapin said in a statement.