Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite which Yahoo acquired in September 2007 for $350M in cash and that competes with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PIMs offered by Google or Zoho.
Zimbra also offers an open source mail client that competes with products such as Microsoft Office and Mozilla Thunderbird.
The platform didn’t get much traction compared to the competitors above and Yahoo is rumored to be trying to sell it since September 2008.
All Things Digital, the tech division of the The Wall Street Journal, is reporting that VMware is acquiring Zimbra.
While this is seems extremely unlikely, WSJ is very reliable news source and Kara Swisher reports confirmations from multiple sources.
So, assuming this rumor will be confirmed as true, the question is: why a virtualization vendor like VMware would want a SaaS collaboration suite like Zimbra?
Possibly because, as virtualization.info already suggested, VMware may be working to compete with Google.
The new CEO Paul Maritz, which has been a top executive in Microsoft for many years, may envision a new VMware which offers IaaS, PaaS (see the SpringSource acquisition) and SaaS technologies all together.
Problem is that VMware has a solid reputation as a virtualization company. And a virtualization company which supports any platform and any application, no matter what the vendor is.
So far VMware has been pretty good at keeping this reputation, despite its parent company EMC.
Post sourced from Virtualization.info
