Zendesk has a lot to be excited about these days. We can celebrate the 1st anniversary for our earliest customers, we have passed 120,000 users and very soon Zendesk can laud its 500th customer. We're growing at an incredible speed and are thrilled that so many are joining us on this path to enlightened customer support.

We have a bunch of interesting announcements coming up in the next months and will continue to dribble out new features and improvements to the system. In contrast to most traditional software companies we don't do versioning or migration releases or anything like that. We have a constant flow of new features and improvements, and we try to make them available in a simple and non-intrusive fashion so they won't disturb our customers' business processes or day-to-day operations.

As you can see from the Customer Karma section on our front page, we have a varied selection of customers. Customers are using Zendesk for employee support, IT help desk, consumer support or B2B support. Some process 10 tickets a week, some 250 tickets a day, some support thousands of end-users, some only a dozen exclusive customers. Some Zendesk customers are traditional brick and mortar businesses, some are pure-play web 2.0 shops, some are divisions of very large enterprises, others are one-man shops. Some are replacing an old Remedy installation to use Zendesk, some are implementing a help desk for the first time.

"We see the beginning of a true commodified help desk as the internet is shuffling the software commodity stack at an incredible speed"

With such a diversified customer base and varied usage pattern we see the beginning of a true commodified help desk. The internet is shuffling the software commodity stack at an incredible speed. Getting online or acquiring an email account was painfully complicated and extremely restrained 10 years ago, nowadays it's just there. Starting up a blog, establishing an intranet or setting up a collaboration tool was still a process for the few just five years ago. Now it's just a matter of investing a few hours and a few bucks before you can set up a fully functional enterprise infrastructure using tools from Google, 37signals, Typepad, Salesforce.com and the likes.

The web revolution arrived late to the help desk industry. But now it's here and in a few years nobody will think of their support system as a large or complicated organizational and technical investment, but as something they turn on with a flick of a switch. And Zendesk plans to spearhead that evolution.

"Zendesk will remain a product with instant gratification and no learning curve. As easy to adopt for the Fortune 5000 company as it is for the 20-man organization."

We will continue to build the product on the principle of Beautifully Simple. Zendesk will remain a product with instant gratification and no learning curve. A product that everybody can apprehend and acknowledge out of the box. A help desk that allows you to hit the ground running and focus on good old customer service rather than complicated business processes. And we will stick to the principle of Beautifully Simple without compromising on the feature set or the enterprise adaptability of our product. Over the next six months you will see new features and offerings from Zendesk that will ensure that Zendesk is as easy to adopt for the Fortune 5000 company as it is for the 20-man organization.

"So if you haven't done so already, now is the time to sit down and put down on paper all the costs you have in running, maintaining, upgrading, configuring and extending your current support system"

We feel certain that an Enterprise 2.0 industry will soar in the current economic climate. Historically the implementation and development of internal systems have also been expensive organizational maturation and retention projects. Those days are probably over. And the IT department is rapidly changing its role from hardware janitor to service operator. The hidden costs of running your own commodity systems have seriously started to surface.

So if you haven't done so already, now is the time to sit down and put down on paper all the costs you have in running, maintaining, upgrading, configuring and extending your current support system. Compare that to the US$2,000 a year a Zendesk system will cost you (for 10 agents). Can you justify the cost difference in actual financial metrics?

Can you identify the added value you get from your current expensive system compared to the costs of Zendesk? If you can and we can't dispute your calculation, we will send you one of our infamous Zendesk Buddha Machines and one of our very green Zendesk tees. Grab your pen and calculator. We're ready and looking forward.

If you haven't seen it already check out our Customer Karma, where we have persuaded select clients to say a few nice words about us.

But apart from these handpicked quotes it's often a humbling experience to work in Zendesk support or sales. This is some of the latest humbling flattery that have reached our inboxes (or rather our support and service system):

"I have been very impressed with Zendesk - you have made a really easy-to-use application but one that is also very powerful. It is one of the best (if not the best) web application I have come across."

"I'm really glad that I found Zendesk, it really has changed the way we work. We implemented Zendesk as a result of being upset, overworked and fed up with management. No one ever seemed to have the time to think about what IT was doing or what was planned."

"Your software is most likely the best available at this point. It is well designed, has a great interface, has a tremendous amount of features, and so far has worked exactly as expected. I was very fortunate to come across it after a long search through many vendors. It looks like it is going to help our new business get started successfully."

"My company is impressed with Zendesk's service. We have always been run it ourselves, but we've seen the light and now know that running our own services is detracting our smart minds from building and enhancing our own product."

"Just signed up for a free trial and am really impressed with the solution after 20 minutes of playing with it - well done! Might even get some of my clients to look at investing in the service within their own businesses."

"First, I wanted to say what a great product you have made! We are migrating to a combination of Harvest and Zendesk from a Windows-only product called Autotask and we will never look back."

"We are in the process of walking away from the in-house BMC application we currently use and moving to a Zendesk solution. We are very impressed with your capabilities and your company has been awesome to work with."

Thanks for all your support. We're growing at an incredible speed these days and are strongly motivated by the overwhelming feedback we get from our customers.

One of the great benefits of a SaaS solution is the constant flow of improvements and new features that effortlessly sneak into your help desk. To stay up to date on all new features and application enhancements, we recommmend that you subscribe to our Product Announcement RSS feed.

Here's a brief list or recent additions:

• You can now make Zendesk notifications even more personal. A notification from your help desk can carry the "From" name of the agent or customer responding to the ticket.
• Zendesk business rules can now contain both ALL and ANY conditions.
• Set up distinct SLAs for individual customer organizations.
• Help desk wide search has been optimized and received a layout overhaul. Plus it now comes with nifty little shortcuts.
• The REST interface supports attachments.
• Winmail.dat files are now decoded and added correctly to tickets.
• There's a new iPhone Safari interface, and Zendesk now supports Blackberry and Windows Mobile web clients too.
• Macros now supported when bulk updating.

Read more about the new features in our support forum.