Nine Lives Media has released its Open Source 50 Report that identifies the top 50 open source companies building channel partner programs. Varguy from Nine Lives Media analyzes the growth of Zimbra, an open source email and collaboration suite provider from Yahoo. Yahoo acquired Zimbra in the last quarter of 2007.
The analysis reports that:
- Zimbra has contributed 52% of partnership revenue in 2008, up from 34% in 2007
- Zimbra's partner network has grown to 665 companies in 2008, up 40% from 475 partners in 2007
- Zimbra has become the cost-effective alternative to many other available solutions, for a number of universities with its launch of Zimbra Hosted for EDU
Overall, Zimbra claims to have reached more than 20 million Zimbra email and collaboration Inboxes in 30,000 organizations. This is almost double when compared to 11 million paid boxes in June 2007. Zimbra seems to be growing fast under its channel partner program.
The analysis says it is difficult to determine the truth of Zimbra's claim without statistics from Yahoo. Besides many of the Zimbra Inboxes deployed may be of the free variety.
Yahoo revamped its Calender service based on the Zimbra platform in October 2008. Later Yahoo's Zimbra products entered cloud computing in the same month. Zimbra products include Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0, Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop, and Zimbra Mobile
Images Courtesy: Zimbra Website
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