Head-to-Head: Zimbra vs Scalix

Key Positioning vs Scalix

• Innovation leadership . Zimbra has consistently demonstrated innovation leadership in emerging areas of messaging and collaboration, including web-based mash-ups (Zimlets), rich web document authoring and sharing, native over-the-air mobile synchronization, comprehensive server-side indexing/search, and VOIP. Conversely, with less demonstrable innovation, Scalix has relied mostly upon TCO positioning based on Linux. In addition, Scalix’s reliance on HP OpenMail (15+ years old and discontinued by HP) and Oddpost limit Scalix’s ability to innovate in core product areas.

• Foundation in open source. Zimbra started as an open source company (as most leading open source projects have done) and open sources all of its key product components -- providing full product transparency and customer investment protection. Conversely, Scalix is attempting to migrate to open source (a strategy without successful market precedent), is open sourcing a discontinued code base (likely not attractive to the open source community), and has no plans or entitlements to open source its web client. In addition, Zimbra has strong relationships with leading open source companies (such as Red Hat and MySQL), is deployed at many leading open source vendors (such as Digium/Asterisk and Mozilla), and has been a key contributor to open source projects such as the OpenAjax Alliance. Finally, Zimbra’s open source foundation enables clean bundling of best-of-breed open source components as product building blocks – a strategy Zimbra regularly employs with the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (which currently bundles 40+ open source components) to rapidly provide innovation and high-quality solutions. Conversely, Scalix has consumed resources attempting to reproduce functionality that already exists in the open source community, effectively competing with those technologies instead of embracing them.

• Rapid market adoption . In just over a year since its initial release (Aug 2005), the Zimbra Collaboration Suite has been downloaded over 200,000 times. In addition, in less than a year since its first commercial release (Nov 2005), Zimbra has over 1.5 million paid mailboxes across 1000+ organizations. Scalix has experienced much lower growth rates – after over two years of market availability, Scalix recently announced just 35,000 downloads, 1 million total mailboxes, and 350 enterprise customers. In addition, web site statistics from companies such as Alexa consistently indicate that Zimbra’s web site activity is nearly 4 times that of Scalix, indicative of rapid growth and interest in the Zimbra solution.

Responses to Scalix Positioning

• “Scalix is going open source, so Scalix customers can get all the benefits that open source provides.”

Zimbra response: Although Scalix is making efforts to become more open source, it has a significant amount of work to do in support of this effort, and the ability to transition from proprietary software to open source software is not a strategy with successful market precedent. In addition, Scalix is open sourcing “old” OpenMail code (likely not attractive to the open source community), and key portions of Scalix’s code (such as the Scalix web client) are not being open sourced. Conversely, Zimbra has provided the key elements of a successful open source project since its first product release -- including a source code repository with revision history, an open bug/enhancement tracking system, active developer and user forums, and a process for code contributions -- all leading to higher quality software, faster feature delivery, and an active global Zimbra community. In addition, Zimbra has strong relationships (customers, partners, and investors) with other open source leaders, and is prominent in open source communities such as SourceForge.net (recently winning the SourceForge.net Community Choice for Enterprise award) and freshmeat.

• “Scalix has the most mature Outlook/MAPI connector in the market.”

Zimbra response: Scalix markets the maturity of its Outlook/MAPI connector based on how long it has been available, but it still lacks many of the key functional and architectural elements demanded by today’s Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2006 Zimbra, Inc.

Head-to-Head: Zimbra vs Scalix organizations. The Zimbra Connector for Outlook (ZCO) was architected from its inception to support cached mode, asynchronous server synchronization, offline access, and auto-detection of online status. In addition, the ZCO communicates natively over standard web ports (HTTP or HTTPS), enabling seamless integration into distributed network environments without additional firewall configurations or VPNs.

• “Scalix is the best Linux alternative available, including providing support for Evolution.”

Zimbra response: Zimbra has broad server-side support for Linux, and won Linux Journal’s most recent “Best Messaging Solution” award (August 2006) in which Scalix was a participant. On the desktop, after Windows, Mac is currently much more prominent than Linux (~8x according to Net Applications), and as a result Zimbra supports full synchronization with native Mac desktop collaboration clients such as iCal and Entourage. For the small number of Linux desktops present today, the Zimbra web client fully supports Firefox on Linux.

Product Comparison Matrix

Category Feature Zimbra Scalix 10 Rich, cross-browser web interface Yes Yes Web mash-ups + on-demand interaction with external content Yes No Conversations Yes No Tags/Categories Yes Requires Outlook Group/resource scheduling Yes Requires Outlook Contacts/calendar sharing Yes Requires Outlook Web-based Subscribe to RSS/ATOM feeds Yes No Collaboration and Native VOIP integration Yes No Productivity HTML views of attachments Yes No Rich web document authoring Yes No File/document sharing Yes Yes Keyboard navigation/shortcuts Yes Partial Publish/subscribe content outside domain Yes No Comprehensive server-side indexing/search Yes No Attachment contents indexing/search Yes No Custom content object indexing/search Yes No Native over-the-air sync for mail, contacts, calendar Yes No Over-the-air sync to BlackBerry devices Yes Yes Mobility and Client Outlook/MAPI over HTTP/S Yes No Compatibility Outlook cached mode Yes No Outlook delegated access Yes Yes Mac desktop client support Yes No Web-based administration Yes Yes Comprehensive command line administration tools Yes Yes Multiple domains + domain-level administration/delegation Yes No Integrated Anti-Spam/Anti-Virus Yes No Clustering/High-Availability Yes Yes Administration & Online mailbox-level backup/restore/move Yes No Total Cost of Hierarchical storage management Yes No Ownership Instant attachment conversion to HTML Yes No Open source code Yes No Comprehensive web service interfaces Yes No Domain-specific branding and themes Yes No Linux/Mac server support Yes No Mac Active Directory integration Yes Yes

Zimbra, Zimlets, and the Zimbra logos are registered trademarks of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2006 Zimbra, Inc.