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Zimbra for Service Providers
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) was designed to be deployed by service providers, such as carriers/operators, broadband providers, and Internet service providers (ISPs). Zimbra provides state-of-the-art messaging and collaboration software (email, calendaring, web document/spreadsheet authoring, etc.) for the service provider's consumer and/or business customers. The ZCS architecture is ideally suited for today's growing market for Service Provider-Based Email and Collaboration (PDF).
ZCS has much to offer to service providers:
- End-user/consumer features that drive revenue and increase "stickiness" -
- Revenue generation (see detailed presentation) through content-specific advertisements (see screenshot), automated content linking (think "AdWords"), as well as through Zimbra's extensible mash-up/portlet architecture (Zimlets) for up-/cross-selling value-added services from the service provider and/or its affiliates.
- Rich Web 2.0/Ajax user interface (see Flash demos) with search, sharing, RSS, VoIP, tagging, etc. that is ahead of the leading web portals today.
- Easy "reskinning" and rebranding of the Zimbra UI to enhance the service provider's brand.
- Support for a broad range of email clients (Microsoft, Apple, Linux) and mobile devices via "over the air" sync.
- Low total cost of ownership (TCO) for large scale deployment -
- Modern distributed architecture for very high scalability---Zimbra has demonstrated that it can handle 50,000 active users and 100,000s of provisioned users per dual CPU server.
- Native volume and hierarchical storage management (HSM) to accommodate large quotas on commodity storage.
- Multi-tenancy for hosting large numbers of domains.
- Class of service provisioning for all major features.
- Strong internet-based security (SSL/TLS for all protocols), with support for single sign-on via the service provider's portal.
- Native anti-spam (AS) and anti-virus (AV).
- Proven capabilities ensure smooth data migration (See Zimbra Migration Whitepaper PDF).
At the same time, Zimbra also uniquely protects the service provider's investment:
- ZCS is itself open source.
- ZCS leverages mature open source server infrastructure - Linux/Unix file system for the message store, MySQL for meta-data storage, Apache for web container, Lucene for search, etc. (See the Zimbra Architecture Overview for more detail.)
- ZCS supports standard protocols for interoperability - POP3, IMAP4, iCalendar, HTTP/S, REST, RSS, MAPI, iSync, and so on.
- All ZCS operations and network protocols use open XML/SOAP for easy integration.
- Zimbra uses standard MIME format for storing messages on disk (one message/file), which means the formats are open to operating system utilities and scripts.
- Zimbra worked in collaboration with IBM to co-found the Open Ajax Alliance to ensure that Web 2.0/Ajax solutions like Zimbra remain viable across clients, operating systems, browsers, and languages, just as is the case for the World-wide Web.
ZCS for service providers comes in both consumer and business editions, and service providers are free to mix and match consumer and business end-users within a single ZCS deployment.
Next Steps
If you are a service provider interested in deploying the Zimbra Collaboration Suite for your consumer and/or business customers, please fill out this brief form so we can follow up with you. You are also encouraged to either:
Most of all, we welcome your feedback on how we can work together to provide the best possible service to your end-user consumer and business customers.
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