Zimbra Sold to VMware

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Rumors earlier this month proved true, as Tuesday’s announcement confirms that VMware has agreed to acquire Zimbra, a vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc. Since Yahoo! bought Zimbra in 2007, Zimbra has been an independent Yahoo! product division. Rumors that Zimbra was available for sale first began circulating last fall.

Zimbra 6.0 collaboration suite now on the market, provides open-source email, calendaring, and collaboration software. The offering currently targets organizations of all sizes, as well as cloud and hosting providers. According to VMware, the collaboration suite has more than 55,000 users and a rapidly growing customer base.

In a blog, Steve Herrod, chief technology officer for VMware stated: “I like many things about the Zimbra offerings. First and foremost, the team is extremely motivated and talented. Furthermore, the products have really been soundly architected and are known for their outstanding scalability, elegant user interfaces, interesting mash-up creation capabilities (Zimlets), and administrative simplicity.”

Herrod notes that there were two main reasons for VMware wanting Zimbra: one is that the company can contribute to VMware’s strategy to simplify computing and the other is that Zimbra will help expand its VMware vCloud initiative.

Adds Brian Byun, vice president and general manager of Cloud Services for VMware, “Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience. Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider.”

Yahoo! is expected to continue to use Zimbra technology in its communication services including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Published January 13, 2010