Case Study: Transylvania University achieves 61% lower TCO and modernized campus collaboration with Zimbra

Transylvania University Leaps Ahead to Next Generation Collaboration and Virtualization Solution

Transylvania University, a small liberal‑arts college in Lexington, Kentucky with about 1,100 students and 300 faculty and staff, faced a growing gap between modern collaboration expectations and its aging Novell NetMail email system. The legacy platform offered only basic webmail and limited Outlook/calendar support, required costly external maintenance, and could not support campuswide file sharing, calendaring or mobile access—so the IT team needed a less administratively intensive, budget‑friendly way to add rich collaboration and shrink the hardware footprint.

The university selected Zimbra Collaboration Suite paired with VMware ESX to provide a modern web interface, Outlook and Active Directory support, mobile access and virtualization. The deployment consolidated services into 21 virtual machines on two physical servers, enabled HA and vMotion, cut collaboration software licensing and support TCO by 61%, halved the physical server count, reduced admin time, and increased student and faculty satisfaction with calendaring, sharing and mobile access.

Transylvania University

Jason Whitaker

Director of IT, Transylvania University