Universities Embrace Open Source Email

Earlier this year, The VAR Guy spent considerable time blogging about Zimbra’s open source email platform. He suspected that the collaboration suite would gain momentum with colleges. Boy was he right. In recent months, Zimbra deployments have more than doubled in higher education. For Exchange and Lotus Domino/Notes VARs serving higher education, it might be time to give Zimbra a look.

More than 100 colleges and universities now run Zimbra. Eager adopters, the company claims, include:

Some of the deployments push beyond 50,000 in-boxes. In some cases, Zimbra has also given Apple Servers a lift in higher education.

Although there’s a free version of Zimbra, the company has also sold more than 6 million Zimbra licenses as of January 2007, up from 5 million paid licenses in 4Q 2006.