Noteworthy: Zimbra targets .edu with new hosted collaboration suite

By David Chartier | Published: October 28, 2008 - 11:34AM CT

Zimbra Hosted has become the first public product to find its home in Yahoo's recently announced cloud computing infrastructure. With this new hosted version of its e-mail and collaboration suite, Zimbra is now directly competing with Zoho, Google Apps, and Microsoft Office, though for the launch, the company is focusing on the education market.

While Zimbra boasts an education client base of more than 500 institutions, the majority of them, thus far, are running Zimbra on local servers due to many of the same privacy and data security concerns that they share with businesses. Due to tightening budgets and maturing cloud computing products that promise less overhead and reduced operating costs, though, Zimbra is trying to expand further into the education market.