On Tuesday, January 12, 2010, VMware announced the acquisition of Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc.
VMware intends to grow the brand, which increased its commercial mailbox count by 86% to over 55 million in 2009, and integrate the product into its vSphere-based cloud infrastructure. Analysts say that VMware is targeting a market segment dominated by Microsoft’s Exchange/Outlook Email and collaboration solution. The acquisition of Zimbra is the next step after the 2009 acquisition of SpringSource, a Java application framework maker, and highlights VMware’s attempt to expand their virtualization and cloud technologies to include an Enterprise stack.
The VMware news release on the Zimbra acquisition can be found here.
