Linux.com

There are 19.2 million reasons Julie Hanna Farris is a trailblazer, according to the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives. Last year, Farris was honored for a second year in a row with the FWE Trailblazer Award for bringing in more than $1 million in venture capital in a year -- Farris garnered close to $6 million -- bringing the total she's raised as founder of San Mateo, Calif.-based Scalix Corp. to almost $20 million.

Scalix builds open standards-compliant email applications that run on Linux and use open source and proprietary components. The software's main claim to fame is its interoperability with both proprietary and open systems, allowing Scalix's clients to choose their own email clients -- even (gak!) Microsoft Outlook. Though Scalix serves large clients in business, government and education, its main drive recently has been to provide software and services to the growing hosted mail market.

"My vision when starting Scalix was that mail was in great need of innovation and of a new-generation architecture," says Farris. "We're really stressing it and breaking the back of the infrastructure because of overuse."