Acquisitions

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.

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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.

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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).

Par 4 Technology Group, a provider ofvirtualization and data management IT solutions has acquired Flytrap Technologies, a virtualization, storage, professional services and managed/cloudservices company.

The acquisition will be a stock only transaction and the combined company will operate under the Par 4 Technology Group name.

“Despite economic uncertainty – we’re growing simply because we understand ourcustomers business challenges and we develop a solution to solve the problem quickly and with a goal of immediate “return on investment”. Customer success is our #1 priority. The complementary disciplines [Par 4 sales and Flytrap consulting/managed services] will allow us to provide more value to our customers and prospects.” Gary Halloran – Par 4 President.

Beginning Q1 2010, all sales operations will continue to run from Par 4’s Amesbury, MaHQ location. Corporate marketing and operations will be managed at Flytrap’s Tolland,CT HQ while engineering, managed and cloud based services will continue to operatefrom Flytrap’s Willimantic, CT Datacenter and Network Operations Center.

CA today announced that it has completed its $200 million acquisition of NetQoS, a provider of network performance management and service delivery management solutions.

The addition of the NetQoS network-centric response time analytics, flow monitoring, and unified communications management solutions enable CA to offer a robust and comprehensive service delivery and assurance portfolio, spanning network and systems management, application performance management, and virtualization and cloud management.

Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA. CA plans to continue to make the NetQoS portfolio available as stand-alone products.

CA also plans to proactively extend its leadership position in network and systems management, application performance management, and cloud management by offering the NetQoS products as integrated components of these solutions.

BMC Software today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited (Tideway), a leading provider of IT discovery solutions.

The acquisition will enhance BMC’s Business Service Management(BSM) platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.

The new offering supports the complete set of discovery requirements for BSM and features deep integration with BMC’s Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) based on Tideway’s long-time membership in BMC’s Technology Alliance Partner program. This presents customers an in-depth understanding of the relationships and dependencies of their physical assets and applications not currently available from any other vendor.

The addition of Tideway technology provides BMC customers with the industry’s largest open library of predefined IT configuration discovery patterns. These patterns provide out of the box descriptions of software and hardware resources that allow IT organizations to automatically identify and characterize their environment and map related application dependencies and services.

When combined with the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) solution, BMC will deliver unmatched visibility into the data center and rapidly reduce the time and resources required to model, manage and maintain applications and services. This is critical for IT organizations that are transitioning applications and services to cloud computing environments.