Zimbra reaches milestone, reinforces Yahoo's Mail business
Zimbra, the online and desktop e-mail and collaboration software, has hit a new milestone. The Yahoo-owned company said today that it now has 40 million paid users - an impressive number for a company that has really been a bit under the radar.
I actually should be paying closer attention to what Zimbra's doing. In its own blog post this morning, VentureBeat cites comscore numbers from January that show Zimbra ahead of Gmail in the U.S., with 31.4 million users, compared to the 31.2 million unique visitors to Gmail.
It had been a while since I'd looked at Zimbra so I went through the company's online video demo again this morning and really liked what I see. There's flexibility all over the place - from dragging and dropping contacts to AJAX technology that allows users to schedule appointments directly from an e-mail window, without forcing the launch of a calendar app. I also liked that Zimbra gets along with everyone on the playground - it works on mobile devices (Blackberry, iPhone and Treo, among others) as well as the Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. It plays nice with Gmail, Exchange, Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail - and, of course, Yahoo Mail.
It's worth noting that the growth was fueled, in part, by a big deal it cut with Comcast a couple of years ago. This image, from Zimbra, shows its growth in paid mailboxes.
The growth also reinforces the idea that Mail is critical to Yahoo - a position shared by us here at ZDNet, as well as new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who referenced a post by Larry's post in front of analysts earlier this week. Yahoo has been in a world of pain for some time but Mail - which is the most-trafficked property in Yahoo's network of sites - could help bring the company out of its mess.
Data from Hitwise puts Yahoo as the pack-leader for Web-based mail, with 56.46 percent of market share, well above the 19.14 percent of No. 2 Microsoft and 10.82 percent of No. 3 Google.
Yahoo acquired Zimbra for $350 million in September 2007.