The story of Zimbra

Updated

Here’s our Mercury News story about Zimbra, the San Mateo start-up that is taking on Microsoft with its new open-source AJAX-filled email platform. We mentioned them earlier here, but this latest story goes a bit deeper.

Zimbra has a free version for individuals who don’t want to make money from it, but…

its main purpose is to sell to large companies that are already using competing products such as Microsoft.

One thing we didn’t mention, for lack of space, is the attention chief executive Satish Dharmaraj (he is on left, in this picture; click to enlarge) took to choosing his investors. Every one of them has experience in open-source or selling to big companies (enterprise). These investors have backed big-name open-source companies Redhat, MySQL and JBoss — a decent roster for any company trying to succeed in open-source.

(Photo by Karen T. Borchers — Mercury News)

Update: Included link to Merc story