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Zimbra customers spooked by Microsoft's Yahoo bid
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"We don't have the greatest faith on Microsoft overall," said Armagost, adding that Brigham Oil & Gas is a big user of Sun servers and that it is currently transitioning to Linux machines.
Word of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo also has Benson Wong concerned. As senior real estate technologist at Sutton Group Realty Services in Canada, Wong is overseeing the implementation of the Zimbra suite, scheduled to start in March. "Microsoft has Exchange, so the concern is that it might decide that it doesn't want Zimbra at all," Wong said in an interview.
Like Armagost and Halbach, Wong isn't a fan of Exchange. At the other end of the spectrum, none of the three men would consider Web-hosted options like Google Apps because they want to have their e-mail server software installed on their companies' premises in order to have control over it.
That's why none chose the Zimbra option to have the suite hosted externally by a third party in a software-as-a-service model. The three companies use the suite's commercial Network Edition -- there's also the free Open Source Edition -- but they like the flexibility that the open-source nature of the software gives them.
In short, for them, Zimbra is the best option in the market for e-mail. The concerns from these three customers are echoed in hundreds of postings made by their peers in blogs and discussion forums, such asin this threadon a Zimbra board.
Some analysts also share this view. In a note commenting on Microsoft's bid, The 451 Group analysts forecast that Microsoft will have little interest in keeping Zimbra going: "Microsoft will have to decide what to do with Zimbra; our guess is that it will let it wither and die, rather than spin it off and leave it as a threat to Exchange," they wrote.
In the meantime, The Metropolitan Companies, Sutton Group and Brigham Oil & Gas are moving forward with their respective plans for the software while keeping an eye on the acquisition possibility.
As Halbach put it, it's a "wait-and-see" attitude at The Metropolitan Companies. "We're making strategic plans in case we had to switch: What would we choose and how would we go about doing it?" Halbach said. "That's a nightmare scenario for us, because we're going to have to change everybody who is working for us across the country. It'd be a major transition."
