VMware to acquire Zimbra

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 04:37

IT Industry - Listed Tech

Virtualisation specialist VMware has agreed to acquire Yahoo!'s Zimbra email and collaboration subsidiary.

This one slipped through to the keeper: VMware last week announced it had reached an agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo!.

Yahoo! purchased the email and collaboration vendor in 2007 for around $US350 million. The goal was to further enhance Yahoo!'s "leadership position in Web mail," according to Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president, communications and communities at Yahoo!.

That transaction resulted in Zimbra becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!, and it seems that structure has made it relatively easy for Yahoo! to hive it off now that the "leadership position in Web mail" seems to be well and truly taken by Google.

The price agreed by VMware and Yahoo! has not been disclosed, and Yahoo! will retain the right to use Zimbra technology in its services. The deal should be completed by the end of the current calendar quarter.

So why does VMware want an email and collaboration vendor? Company officials present Zimbra's software as providing a full enterprise feature set with an architecture designed for virtualisation and cloud-scale infrastructure, all at a lower total cost of ownership.

"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," said Brian Byun, VMware's vice president and general manager, cloud services.

The company says it plans continued support for existing Zimbra products and open source efforts, but will also optimise the products for use on vSphere-based cloud infrastructure.

One possibility is that VMware will offer preconfigured Zimbra software appliances that can be quickly and easily installed by customers ranging from smaller businesses through to enterprise scale organisations.

And if 'Zimbra from WMware' achieves significant takeup by hosted and cloud service providers, it could encourage them - and organisations that want to keep at least part of their IT capability in-house - to adopt vSphere as a strategic platform.