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:
- Zimbra will further our mission of simplifying IT
- 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.
