Logix Boosts Revenue by 30 Percent with Zimbra

Logix InfoSecurity specializes in email hosting and web-based communications, serving more than 800 customers across India. To keep up with an evolving market that was significantly impacted by a sharp rise in smartphone adoption, Logix needed a new, dynamic and feature-rich platform that could meet customer demands. Zimbra was the answer.

The Challenge

Before using Zimbra, Logix had built its position as a leading hosted email service on a customized homegrown email solution. In recent years, as smartphone adoption grew exponentially in India, users demanded integration between smartphones with email. Logix realized this was an opportunity to grow its customer base.

The homegrown Logix solution, based only on POP and IMAP, was not capable of handling the market’s demands, however. Logix needed to deploy an email solution that provided true synchronization between a smartphone and the user’s mailbox, contacts and calendars – which the previous system could not do. The company needed a full communication platform that could offer mobile device integration, collaboration and all the latest features.

Logix customers also demanded Microsoft Outlook synchronization with email, calendars, contacts and  other data. Again, this was a capability not offered by the previous email solution.

In addition, Logix had to compete with Google and other Web-based email providers that offer substantial mailbox storage, so users can store multiple years of email data. Users were demanding email inboxes with as much as 25 GB of storage, which was impractical with the previous system.

The Solution

Logix deployed Zimbra as its primary email hosting platform. Now Logix offers Zimbra Collaboration Suite as a hosted service to all its customers across India. Logix migrated many of its existing customers to Zimbra, and in less than a year the company became the top Zimbra hosting provider in India. In addition, Logix is a Zimbra reseller that implements and manages Zimbra deployments for customers.

Logix offers three editions of Zimbra: Cloud Zimbra, a shared Zimbra hosting platform; Zimbra Virtual Private Server; and a Zimbra-Exchange hybrid platform.

Partner Benefits

Increased Revenue –

Due to the many attractive features of Zimbra designed to meet the market’s demands, Logix revenue has grown by 30 percent since the company started offering Zimbra. The presence that VMware has in the market, the awareness of the VMware brand, has also added to the commercial strength of the solution.

High Reliability and Availability –

“The downtime of Zimbra is much lower compared to our previous mailing solution,” explains Prashant Mudbidri, Director of Logix. “The reliability factor is much, much higher than the previous system. Uptime for Zimbra is 99.9 percent.”

Less Administration Time –

“Zimbra reduces our administration time,” says Mudbidri. “For example, it is very easy to migrate a set of users from one server to another server, without impacting the user. This was quite cumbersome when we were on the previous platform. In the previous mailing system, we were spending days to accomplish these tasks. With Zimbra we spend less than an hour. Zimbra has reduced our administration cost drastically.”

As another example, the Logix IT team saves time with backup as well. The backup cycle used to take more than three days to complete, with the previous mail system. With Zimbra, a full backup takes twelve hours, and the incremental backup takes less than two hours.

Eliminated Need for In-House Development

One of the most important advantages of Zimbra is that it enabled Logix to deploy the platform quickly, rather than expend the time and expense of developing a new email system in-house.

“Zimbra offers a great set of functionality which we did not want to have to develop ourselves,” Mudbidri points out. “We could have developed an email solution in-house but it would have taken a long time – up to a year and a half to develop and implement – which means we would have brought the solution to market quite late.”

“If we had developed our own solution in-house, we would not have been able to address key requirements like mobility and Microsoft Outlook synchronization,” he adds. “We would not have been able to achieve the functionality that were the key drivers for changing the email solution in the first place.”

Fast Provisioning and Commissioning –

Zimbra adoption, implementation and migration was seamless, according to Mudbidri. Now Logix takes just 24 hours to onboard any customer.

Continuous Improvement –

“Since VMware acquired Zimbra, they have added many excellent improvements to the solution,” says Mudbidri. “In the roadmap, VMware continues to look forward in terms of integrating with unified communications and adding more valuable features to Zimbra.”

Customer Benefits

Ease of Use –

Zimbra offers an easy-to-use Webmail front-end to Logix customers, with convenient drag-and-drop functionality.

Webmail Flexibility –

“When customers migrate to Zimbra, we see an increase in Webmail usage, which makes data management much easier, because the mail client is not residing on the user’s laptop or desktop,” Mudbidri explains. “Users like Zimbra Webmail because it is easy to use and intuitive, they can use their choice of browser, and they can enjoy all the same benefits as a mail client.”

Improved Collaboration –

One of the greatest advantages of Zimbra, for Logix customers, is having a mailbox that is very feature rich, says Mudbidri. Zimbra offers extensive collaboration functionality, including Zimbra Briefcase, shared contacts and shared calendars.

Productive Mobility –

“Smartphone synchronization is a key advantage Zimbra provides our customers,” Mudbidri confirms. “With Zimbra, they can synchronize their entire mailbox, contacts and calendars with their smartphone, iPad or tablet. This enhances customer productivity to a great extent.”

Backup and Restore –

“Backup and restore is one key feature that other mailing systems, especially Cloud-based solutions  like Google, fail to deliver,” Mudbidri notes. “Backup and restore is something that our customers see as a key feature, a value-added advantage from Zimbra that they do not get with other cloud mailing solutions.”

Built-In Archiving –

“Archiving has become a top need for the customers, a must-have feature,” says Mudbidri, “and archiving is built into Zimbra. This is something every customer is looking at, and they do not want to do it in-house.”

With Zimbra Archiving, there is no need to maintain a large mailbox. A copy of every email is stored in the archive, which can be easily retrieved by admins and users as needed.

Enhanced Security –

The way Zimbra stores data, and the way users access the system, is far more secure than other email options, according to Mudbidri. Logix utilizes Zimbra to ensure customer emails and data are tamper-proof,  and cannot be seen or copied by anyone, including administrators managing the servers.

Business Control –

Zimbra enables Logix customers to enforce many business control policies such as Mail Sending/Receiving, Access Control, Attachment Size/Type/Mail Content on to Users/Group/Domain.