Zimbra scores big

Zimbra announced today that it has signed a deal with Comcast to provide mailboxes to 12 million subscribers. This is great news for a number of reasons:

• Zimbra lands a major client that should ensure their financial stability in the short-medium term (good for me as a customer)
• Theoretically, this is 12 million possible openings for people to be exposed to an SOA architecture instead of a clunky application on the client (Outlook sucks)
• With such a large potential market, married with the open API/architecture inherent with Zimbra, we should see a whole host of new and interesting Zimlets come into being
• Comcast mail really stunk up until now. The new interface should be pretty sweet– even though I never use Comcast mail, I may give it a try now

Zimbra advocates and utilizes an open source model, with paid-for software in a ‘deluxe’ version.  This is similar to the MySQL AB business model.  I don’t think it is as good as the straight GPL-centric model of Red Hat, it may be a necessary midway model for applications that have enough gravity to charge for ‘licenses’ while still utilizing the Open Source Welcome Mat to gain market share.