Per TechCrunch:
VMware has bought email and collaboration software developer Zimbra from Yahoo. Rumors of the sale have been floating around for some time now but the writing was on the wall when Scott Dietzen, former CTO of Zimbra, quit Yahoo last fall.
From the Zimbra blog:
First and foremost, we want to reassure our community, customers and partners that we stay 100% committed to our mission. Together with VMware, we will accelerate our investments in Zimbra and strive to be even better at building and supporting the best open source email and collaboration software in the market. As always, we will work tirelessly to strengthen and grow our business relationships and service our customers and community.
In just five years, Zimbra has grown to become one of the largest email and collaboration providers in the world with Microsoft and IBM, totaling more than 55 million paid mailboxes at over 150 thousand organizations worldwide – that’s upwards of 80% year-over-year growth.
…
At VMware, Zimbra will continue focusing on our product roadmap and setting the standard for web-based collaboration. Look forward to Zimbra Desktop 2.0, more real-time messaging, new ways for sharing content in collaborative workspaces, enhanced team scheduling and business continuity services. Over time we will also adjust the scope and scale of our roadmap to reflect incremental investment, plus we will integrate Zimbra with VMware’s vSphere cloud infrastructure.
From VMware’s ececutive blog:
With this acquisition, we will extend our focus into email and collaboration, one of the core services (along with areas such as file and print services and identity management) that IT departments universally provide to their users. All four of these technology areas are common to companies large and small. Furthermore, each area is taking growing amounts of IT attention, time, and money without furthering the ultimate goals of the company.
…
This second motivation is very much related to the above point. We launched our VMware vCloud initiative just over a year ago to develop an ecosystem of telecom, hosting, and service providers that offer cloud solutions based on VMware technologies. This ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds, quickly surpassing 1,000 members. Today we offer this ecosystem VMware vSphere-based compute and storage infrastructure upon which they can offer what is commonly referred to as “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS). With the acquisition of SpringSource, we can enable our partners to offer a higher level of cloud-based service; one where programmers can write their code and let the cloud handle the details of how and where it runs. This is commonly referred to as “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS). And with Zimbra, we will now offer our partners an even higher level of cloud capability; one where customers can simply use an application without worrying about the details of how and where it runs. This top layer of the hierarchy is known as “software-as-a-service” (SaaS).
Leave a Reply