Zimbra has ‘Plasticity’

James Governor recently posted an interesting piece on how Zimbra can be leveraged to integrate other applications without context shift – i.e. you roll over a contact in Zimbra and up pops a panel with live data pulled from your accounts system, your order management backend and your CRM – all available without leaving your email window. I started writing a response in his comments box and thought it was worthy of a more expanded note here.

James’ points about ‘plasticity’ are well made and our challenge now, speaking as a Zimbra distributor, is to leverage this attribute and show customers how they can benefit in terms of cost savings, features and user experience by using Zimbra as a core building block within an OSS stack/suite. Then we need more great VARs and SIs who can deliver the projects to the customers – it’s all very well being able to integrate with a bunch of apps, but as we all know, enterprises want a single vendor to shout at – and drive down licence costs ;-), not 5 or 6 independent application suppliers.

We need an extremely strong stack… Does VMWare + Spring + Zimbra do it, no I don’t think so as I believe there are more pieces of the puzzle which need to be added, but it’s a dam good starting point and a much stronger position than where we were last year…

We’re working on putting in place some of the missing pieces of the jigsaw ourselves, and one of those we’ve recently added is DataSyncSuite who we are distributing for in the UK. It’s an interesting solution which provides single sign-on and synchronisation of key data between Zimbra, SugarCRM and Quickbooks so that you only have to login once and everything is kept in sync.

These are only my personal thoughts and I do not speak for Zimbra or VMWare – I’m as interested as James is to see who, if anybody, VMWare buy next… Interesting times and a great opportunity for the channel…