Price questions cheap?? missing something?

[mmorse]

And again everybody is talking about email. Does this mean that the other features are not used or are not valuable in the eyes of businesses?

Certainly not! Integrated calendaring is the second most used feature.
Zimbra is based on requests (how do features get into zimbra?) to that end I see in another of your threads that you've seen the v4.5 demo, but checkout the v5RC1 demo for some new RFE's that got implemented like tasks, briefcase, and aggregated external imap accounts (external pop is already in 4.5). IM is well on it's way & voicemail like some providers are doing are being worked on but you can see some early functionality. (another IM teaser)

P.S.
raj, you explained that you have integrated zimbra on your control panels. Does this mean that users use Zimbra instead of Horde, neo etc mail when login for their email? What for companie do you work for and what is the main reason for people buying the NE version?

With the network edition there's delegated admininistrators. What he means is that for the FOSS edition he built a portal for his clients to use, because he doesn't want to give full access to the admin console: Moral Question - Imail Migration Tool & OSS Zimbra Admin

What most of the hosting partners have done is about 3-4 levels of features & storage. At their highest/business levels they give you access to the delegated admin which can only control accounts/aliases/resources/distribution on one domain (think the top right section if you've seen the admin console). Thus they don't have to get a phone calls/tickets 'please add this account/change this setting' and they don't have to spend hours making a custom portal like raj has nicely done for his FOSS install.

Compare ZCS Features
A brief rundown:
Hot Backups - I can't begin to express how useful those are! - The FOSS edition has cold or 'warm' backups, some take snapshots of an xen, or fork mails, etc, etc; but their ability to quickly restore just one account exactly how it was at a point in time waayy lengthier.
Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) -easily offload data to another storage solutions automatically based on date. ie: Automatically move the messages after say 30 days from your fast SCSI (/more expensive solution & therefore you tend to have less of it. To a SAN of SATA's or something. If you we're to have some performance bottlenecks with this cheaper storage arrary, the end-users don't notice any lag because when they search they see the recent results first anyways.
Clustering/High Availability on RHEL/RHCS (there's FOSS methods using heartbeat/DRBD)
Attachment Indexing -search inside that pdf or word document
Attachment Rendering/Conversion to HTML
Outlook (ZCO) & Apple iSync connectors
Zimbra MobileSync - OTA push & carry your mail/contacts/cal on you phone
(the MobileEdition web-client you see in the demo be free to both versions; it was originally called iZimbra but any browser works)
Archiving & Discovery (ZAD)
Delegated Admins -as previously described above

[phoenix]

And again everybody is talking about email. Does this mean that the other features are not used or are not valuable in the eyes of businesses?

I don't really understand what you're trying to achieve here. I can't tell you what each user is doing with the product but, of course, people do realise the benefit and value of the additional features in Zimbra.

What exactly is it that you're after by these questions?

[Tmanagement]

Thanks all and especially for Bill,

I ask these question to understand why companies use Zimbra and how they use it. These question I ask in comparisson with the question that refers to the cost of one account.

The reason for me asking this is to figure out if and to what extend I will sell this package in the Netherlands. Although I have not worked with it and do not use microsoft exchange or something else I was wondering why Zimbra is charging such a low price for such a feature rich program.

As in my first post i refer to salesforce that is asking over 100 dollars a month per user and although I understand that salesforce is used for creating new business I also see efficiency gains from using Zimbra. Zimbra on the other hand is only charging 3 dollars per user a month for the most feature rich edition. The reason for such a price in my opion could be either:
1. Companies do not know how to use a package like Zimbra to justify a higher price since it makes collaboration more succesfull
2. Companies do not use the features because they do not reap the rewards in practise.
3. Or, competitors are all competing fierce on price.

Of course I could also miss something and thats why I am glad with all the posts about experiences over here.

[raj]

You are missing quite a bit.. it does not cost $3 per month per user
$3 is a cost of liscence ONLY for 1 year

what about:
1) Hardware cost for hosting
2) Maintenance cost
3) Data center cost
4) Support Cost
5) Sales Cost
6) Unexpected costs ..ie: hardware failure, backups and %&^% happens

Once you add all that you will come up with final cost before you sell zimbra service which will be in addition to $3 a month.
Saying zimbra NE is cheap its not true..is it more feature rich and in more active devlopment and cummunity support than exchange..YES

Raj

[mmorse]

Ya don't forget your infrastructure costs

As for their pricing choice -think about it this way: humans resist change. To get someone to willingly change their status quo from an existing solution, you have to offer compelling features that their lacking AND/OR save them money.

I'm sure the zimbra folks have thought long and hard about their pricing structures & strategically positioned themselves.
Plus, they might have chosen the 'volume' model of:
20 million users/$5each = $4,000,000 profit
Whereas something that costs more, might get less sales, and only:
10 million users/$10each = $1,000,000 profit

As for features, RFE votes are part of what shapes zimbra - it's like starting fresh and putting in only what people demand. (Well in addition to employee brainstormed stuff.)

-If you want, you could contact sales & they can provide you with comparison charts between other products.

What's cool, is that outside of downloads (and if you choose to 'report that you've installed version __ during install) they really don't track the number of FOSS users, only the paid mailboxes. People like raj have built whole businesses around the free version.

I remember one person who posted something to the effect of: "Hey, I love the previews and demos of the web-client that I've seen - going to convince our company to implement it soon!"
And shortly thereafter replied: "OMG we're already using it at our company for IMAP & POP! (unless you look closely you'd only see posfix) But we just didn't use the web-client because our hardware solution wasn't up to par. I've pushed through the IT purchase of new hardware and we'll have a decent web-client frontend in less than 2 weeks!!!

[Tmanagement]

You are missing quite a bit.. it does not cost $3 per month per user
$3 is a cost of liscence ONLY for 1 year

what about:
1) Hardware cost for hosting
2) Maintenance cost
3) Data center cost
4) Support Cost
5) Sales Cost
6) Unexpected costs ..ie: hardware failure, backups and %&^% happens

Once you add all that you will come up with final cost before you sell zimbra service which will be in addition to $3 a month.
Saying zimbra NE is cheap its not true..is it more feature rich and in more active devlopment and cummunity support than exchange..YES

Raj

Thanks Raj for you comments,

However, there are numerous hosted offers for around 10 dollars a month a user which is declining when more and more users are added. So suppose that you have average employee costs of 2500 dollars a month in total all employees must be able to work about 40 minutes on average more productive a month in order to justify 10 dollars.

So, does Zimbra helps employees to work 2 minutes more effective a day? By the way are there any threads that compare Zimbra with Microsoft exchange and other competitors?

[raj]

If you are new to hosting business then you have quite a bit of learning curve.
Businesses run break-even for years before they go into profit.

You cannot calculate the cost as you just mentioned.

Raj

[mmorse]

I would suggest that you contact their (zimbra's) sales department as well:

-If you want, you could contact sales & they can provide you with comparison charts between other products.

http://www.zimbra.com/forums/zimbra-success-stories/

Update: Did PM him with:

Here's two that you'll probably get from sales anyway - lol
http://files.zimbra.com/website/zimb...07_webinar.pdf
-ok well you're looking to host your own, so Google Apps obviously just ain't a solution of choice but here it is anyway
http://files.zimbra.com/website/zimb...ps_webinar.pdf

Thanks mmorse!

[Krishopper]

It's not that those business features aren't value, they're very valuable, to those that require them, and not everybody requires them.

The average joe or small sandwich shop business down the street may not require mobile email (other than what POP3/IMAP can give them). The speed of the Zimba Web client is very nice, and is professional looking. Drag and drop, right-clicking, its a very nice thin client - people like that. I have customers paying me for email hosting, but if I was going to charge them $2/mailbox/month, they'd look elsewhere for email, and probably hosting since they can get it all at one place. All they need is web access, POP3/IMAP, and they are looking forward to the briefcase and tasks that are coming in the 5.0 release. I could accomplish the same thing with Postfix/CourierIMAP and PostfixAdmin, but I'd prefer to do it with Zimbra, simply because I like Zimbra a whole lot better. I'm not worried about re-branding the pages as I have no problem advertising Zimbra all over my users email screen.

From the administrative side, the NE features are nice (with the hot backup, clustering, storage migration options, etc..) but some programming time set aside accomplished what I need to enough to make it appear and feel like I'm getting hot backups, clustering, and storage migrating.. it's a big hack on my half, but it works for me, and does what I need.. which is exactly why I like Unix/Linux, it's easy to hack things together to make them work exactly how I want them to.

I'd love to buy the NE version, but I don't have enough people willing to pay me for it that would recover the costs. I wouldn't be worried about seeking to earn a profit off of it since I can profit off of other things, but rather just enough to pay for the server and recover licensing costs but unfortunately I don't have a customer base big enough or demands high enough to justify getting a NE license.

[Tmanagement]

Ok Krishopper I understand what you are trying to say. But if I am correct you are talking about private users not business with 10,100,1000 right?

And Raj, since I was not thinking at first about creating a new hosting business but rather using it for cross-selling it was and is not my intention to make alot of money with Zimbra. I am more interested in how business use it, why they choose Zimbra and why it is offered for the current price.

Since most replies are from hosting companies that offer it to private clients I think that message to the Zimbra sales team will do the trick.

Interesting discussion tho and great to see how helpfull and quick the community responses are.