Dimdim/Zimbra Connection Shows Promise
by Sam Dean - Oct. 24, 2008Comments (4)- Related Blog Posts
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Dimdim is an outstanding open source online conferencing application that we've written about before. It has a number of great features not found in other free online meeting applications, including the ability to record meetings so that the recordings can be shared with others. Earlier this week, Satish Dharmaraj, the co-founder and CEO of Yahoo's open source division Zimbra personally invested in Dimdim, and joined its advisory board.
Dimdim is an unusual company, already backed by the original investors in Skype, Hotmail, and MySQL. It has offices in Boston, New Hampshire, Canada and India. In addition to the open source and free Dimdim application, the company pursues commercial goals. The investment from Satish Dharmaraj comes at a time when Yahoo is finally pushing Zimbra forward, and it looks like the Zimbra applications will begin to integrate with Dimdim.
From the Dimdim announcement:
"I believe that Dimdim real time collaboration capabilities complement Zimbra's asynchronous capabilities to deliver on the vision of unified collaboration," said Satish Dharmaraj. "Dimdim is at the forefront of innovation in the collaboration market and its disruptive technologies and business model are already changing the way that people communicate worldwide. That's why I chose to invest personally in the company."
Zimbra's open source collaboration suite has both client- and server-side components, and there is a commercially supported closed source version. That's the business model that Dimdim pursues too: straddling open and closed source. The Zimbra suite features groupware applications for sharing calendars, e-mail and more. By merging the Zimbra applications with Dimdim's conferencing, Dimdim may become even more differentiated from the many other freeware conferencing products, such as Yugma and Yuuguu.There aren't any clear signs of how much direct application merging we'll see between Dimdim and Zimbra, but that looks like what we'll see.
I'm a fan of Dimdim, so it's good to see more financial backing and the probability of integration with other useful applications arriving.
