Many important future oriented decisions were made in 2008. As Brian Joseph CEO Zarafa, points out: "The move to place all of the core functions of its products under free licensing, enabled Zarafa to clearly distinguish itself from its competitors. In January 2009, this already resulted in additional government implementions in Holland, Belgium and Germany." Also, hosters with millions of users such as Siennax in Amsterdam and Email.it in Milan started to offer Zarafa to their customers.
After an all time record fourth quarter 2008, even the orders in January increased again. Brian Joseph: "We see that our business model with open source and partners still helps us to grow.
Other companies, like Redhat and Google, with open source, good offerings and new business models also do good business."
To extend the open platform, the focus in 2009 will be placed on the perfectly aligned integration with other open source market leaders. Helmuth Neuberger, Managing Director DACH says: " This will enable our partners to add value to customers; inexpensive priced solution stacks which functionally offer everything that the closed source competition has, will lead to a shift in the market. A first result is that Zarafa has been elected as the SugarCRM project of the month in January. The abundant years of the large IT-tankers are over. Now is the time to aggressively use the chances in crisis".
Like last year Zarafa is again at the Cebit Open Source Area with one of the largest booths (hall 6 booth F46). Its European roots and focus motivate Zarafa to invest again with presence at all major European open source events in 2009. The path where free software and Groupware is directed in 2009 will be shown in cooperation with important technology- and trade-partners