In August, I published a blog post explaining our acquisition of SpringSource, the popular open source Java development framework focused on simplifying the task of application development. Furthermore, we liked how SpringSource targets this application development simplicity for both on-premise and cloud deployment targets. Today I’m pleased to announce that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo.  While Zimbra’s domain is different than that of SpringSource, there are several commonalities in the acquisition rationale on how we will move forward with them in our fold.

First, a quick introduction… Zimbra provides open-source email, calendaring, and collaboration software for deployment within companies of all sizes (e.g. Bechtel, Digg, and Stanford), as well as to cloud and hosting providers offering mail services over the web (e.g. Comcast and NTT Communications).  Yahoo! also continues to utilize Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.  From a business perspective, Zimbra is one of the most popular collaboration software offerings, with more than 55,000,000 users and a subscriber base that is growing rapidly. And from a technology perspective, 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.

You may be thinking, “That’s great, Steve, but why is VMware acquiring them?”

There are two primary reasons for the acquisition:

1. Zimbra will further our mission of simplifying IT
2. Zimbra will add to the portfolio of offerings we provide our VMware vCloud™ partners

Let’s go into each of these in more detail:

Read the rest of the post here.

Lost in the news of Zimbra’s release of version 6.0 of its collaboration suite is the importance of one very big number: 50 million. That’s how many paid mailboxes Zimbra claims now, a number that puts it within spitting distance of IBM Lotus Notes (approximately 145 million paid mailboxes) and Microsoft Exchange (approximately 175 million paid mailboxes). Whatever the truth to rumors that Zimbra is up for sale, Zimbra is an appreciating asset for Yahoo, not a depreciating one.

For one thing, it’s important to consider just how explosive this growth has been. In January 2009, Zimbra was at 20 million paid mailboxes. By March, that number had jumped to 40 million paid mailboxes, perhaps a consequence of Comcast mailboxes coming online. (Comcast chose Zimbra to power its Web mail service in 2007.)

That’s a lot of growth in a very short period of time. Zimbra appears to have more than doubled its business in the past year.

Read the rest of the story here.

Big news for Zimbra – we’re excited and looking forward to starting a new chapter as part of VMware. We want to thank Yahoo! for helping Zimbra usher in a period of phenomenal growth over the past 2 years.  And we are proud to have contributed to the current and future success of Yahoo! during this time as well.  Zimbra’s technologies have and will continue to play a role in Yahoo!’s communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.  The Yahoo! team is very happy for us, our customers and our community as we prepare to enter this new era.  We owe Yahoo! a great deal of appreciation for their support.

Read the rest of the announcement here: http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2010/01/zimbra-to-join-vmware.html