ComCast and Zimbra, an open-source company from San Mateo, California, have joined forces bring Zimbra’s next-generation collaboration and messaging software to ComCast customers.[more]

Zimbra, which is backed by venture capital firms like Benchmark Partners and Redpoint Ventures, both of Menlo Park, CA, and Accel Capital of Palo Alto, CA, provides cross-platform solutions (including Linux, Macintosh and Windows) for instant messaging and online collaboration, using Web 2.0 tools.

Although the company declined to offer more details about the newly signed partnership with ComCast, stating that “it’s too early”, it seems that ComCast subscribers will benefit from a simple-to-use, unified communications application that will bring together e-mail, IM, voice mail, smart address book and even RSS feeds. The app will be build using Zimbra’s proprietary AJAX platform called Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5, which packs email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and online document authoring into a rich browser-based interface. Full support is provided for standards-based APIs (IMAP / POP / iCal / CalDAV) as well as MAPI and iSync, which enable seamless compatibility with other clients like Microsoft Outlook, Apple desktop suite, and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Zimbra also offers Zimbra Mobile, which provides over-the-air "push" synchronization to mobile devices without the need for third party software or additional servers for most devices.