Zimbra: Bringing Email to Life

While it seems that many Web 2.0 companies are going nowhere, this is certainly not the case with Zimbra. Basically, the company uses whiz bang technologies -- such as AJAX -- to push the boundaries of email.

According to an announcement this week, Zimbra now has more than 6 million paid mailboxes. In fact, the company added 2 million in the fourth quarter alone.

I had a chance to talk to the company's CEO and cofounder, Satish Dharmaraj. According to him: "I think it was critical that our software is open source. If not, we would have gone nowhere."

Basically, open source means that anyone can download the software and make improvements (there are more than 6,300 members of Zimbra community). For Zimbra, which is a young company, it has been a smart way to leverage its resources.

That's certainly the case with the company's next version of its software: the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.5.

Some of the new features include: POP account aggregation (which allows a user to manage multiple email addresses); multiple identities (you can have different versions – such as for business and personal); and more support for mobile devices.

Of course, expect more this year, such as IM, chat and other cool features.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.