Over at his InfoWorld blog, Dave Rosenberg makes an awfully interesting assertion: Zimbra’s well on the way to becoming a billion-dollar business. However, he uses some way faulty math to get there: he takes at face value Zimbra’s claim of 4 million paid mailboxes, then multiplies it by the $25/mailbox MSRP to get an annualized revenue of $100 million. From there, hey, it’s only an order of magnitude to get to $1 billion, right?
Or not. This “analysis” ignores a couple of inconvenient facts, primarily that almost no one is actually paying $25/year for Zimbra mailboxes. News flash: large volume customers get price breaks from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and, yes, Zimbra. The comments in the original TechCrunch piece do a pretty good job of pointing out a more plausible range. You could also quibble with the measurement of “4 million paid”, given that that probably includes a fair number of their hosted/ISP mailboxes that aren’t actually being used. In fairness, though, IBM and Microsoft don’t break out the number of seats in use vs the number they’ve gotten paid for, so I guess Zimbra shouldn’t have to either.
This is not to say that Zimbra doesn’t have an interesting product. They do, and it’s significant that they’ve generated, and maintained, so much buzz in what most people thought was a settled two-way oligopoly. However, it’s a bigger jump from where they are now to a billion dollars than Mr. Rosenberg seems to think.
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