Let’s start with someone who works for the buyer.  Brian Byun, VMware’s Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Services, said in a statement, "[W]e expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience.  Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud."

That might not mean Yahoo’s missing out on a lot of fantastic opportunities, however.  It’s important to keep in mind that the sale was voluntary, and not some kind of takeover, of course.

Also, Jim Morrisroe, Vice President of Sales at Zimbra, wrote on its corporate blog, "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."

So until the companies reveal a purchase price through an SEC filing – or it leaks some other way – it looks like the matter’s about wrapped up.  The deal is supposed to close this quarter.

Related Articles:

> Yahoo Sale Of Zimbra To VMware Rumored

> Yahoo Zimbra Desktop Now Synching

> Yahoo May Dispose Of Zimbra

Kara Swisher wrote earlier today, "Yahoo is close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources close to the situation. . . .  Sources said the deal will be announced soon, but the price for the open-source email unit was still unclear."

Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million towards the end of 2007, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the price has gone up or down since then.  No overly nasty rumors appear to be in circulation now, at least, considering that Yahoo’s stock rose by 1.91 percent today.  (For reference: the Dow and Nasdaq went up 1.50 percent and 1.73 percent, respectively, so this isn’t amazing.)

Anyway, a development along these lines wasn’t unexpected.  Yahoo’s been unloading properties for a while thanks to Carol Bartz’s get-back-to-basics directive, and in October, Zimbra’s former president and CTO also left the company.

Related Articles:

> Yahoo Zimbra Desktop Now Synching

> Yahoo May Dispose Of Zimbra

> Yahoo Undergoes Another Exec Shuffle

Kara Swisher wrote earlier today, "According to numerous sources, Yahoo has also been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million."

And although Swisher is almost always dead-on, anyway, the report’s especially plausible since Yahoo’s been selling and shutting down a quite a lot of other stuff as of late.

For a little Zimbra history: we first heard about the Yahoo-Zimbra deal on September 17th, 2007.  To be fair, a lot has changed since; at that point in time, Jerry Yang was in charge of the larger corporation and Yahoo’s stock was sitting pretty at around $25 per share.  Now, it’s Carol Bartz’s show and investors are stuck with shares worth about $17 each.

If Yahoo loses too much on Zimbra, however, the recession and other extenuating circumstances still may not be able to save it from taking another significant PR hit.

Swisher listed Comcast and Google as potential Zimbra buyers.

"Zimbra is focused on creating communication and collaboration solutions that ease the pain points of traditional e-mail, and switching between multiple e-mail accounts is one of the communication headaches that users encounter on a daily basis," explained Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra’s co-founder and a Yahoo vice president.

 Satish Dharmaraj

In a statement, he then continued, "With Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop, we have taken our world-class collaboration suite and made it available for everyone for use anywhere, anytime, with any email account."

Any email account accessible by POP or IMAP, anyway.  And with that beta tag looming large, don’t bet on everything working perfectly.

Still, for a free product, Yahoo Zimbra Desktop Beta is pretty impressive.  Moreover, as far as timing goes, it seems that Yahoo managed to beat Google in providing offline support for Gmail.

Although this may not turn the search war’s tide, the development at least makes Yahoo’s $350 million acquisition of Zimbra look a little less odd.

Google has a weakness when it comes to keeping new products a secret. According to Garett Rogers, Google uses volunteers to do much of its foreign translation–they provide them when a sentence or two and the volunteers provide the translation. While Google gets all of their translation needs fullfilled for less than minimum-wage, it can make it hard to keep new products a secret.

Rogers first provided us with a screenshot that suggests a new interface for Gmail might be forthcoming.

Next, Rogers did some additional digging and found more translation screenshots that suggest one of Gmail’s new features will be the much-desired “offline” capability.

Note: Google Gears is the tool that currently allows you to view your RSS Feeds offline.

Other new features include account use logging–so you can confirm who used your account and when.

As a Google Apps user, I’m glad to see Google might soon offer an offline version of Gmail. It’s interesting to note that this comes just days after Yahoo announced their acquisition of Zimbra and Mozilla revealed their plans for Thunderbird. It seems Google becomes highly motivated whenever there’s news from a competitor’s product.

Comments

Tag:

The official word yielded this contradictory gem from Brad Garlinghouse on Yahoo’s official blog:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-and-zimbra-still-an-odd-deal-2007-09/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/zimbra-acquired-by-yahoo-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/zimbra-acquired-by-yahoo-2007-09#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:10:42 +0000 Philipp Lenssen http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40488 Yahoo just acquired Zimbra for 350 million bucks, TechCrunch reports and Yahoo confirms. In Zimbra’s own, slightly cryptic words...

]]> Yahoo just acquired Zimbra for 350 million bucks, TechCrunch reports and Yahoo confirms. In Zimbra’s own, slightly cryptic words…

Zimbra is open source server and client software for messaging and collaboration – email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. The Zimbra server is available for Linux, Mac OS X, appliances, and virtualization platforms. The Zimbra Web 2.0 Ajax client runs on Firefox, Safari, and IE, and features easy integration / mash-ups of web portals, business applications, and VoIP using web services.

Yahoo says:

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us.

Yahoo in their blog remarks, “We see great opportunities to incorporate some of [Zimbra’s] best-of-breed* features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!’s industry-leading communications products.” Mike Arrington, who calls Zimbra an “online/offline office suite”, adds that he wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo picks up online office maker Zoho.com next. “That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.”

*Strike off one from your B.S. Bingo game card…

Comments

Tag:

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/zimbra-acquired-by-yahoo-2007-09/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-purchases-zimbra-for-350-million-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-purchases-zimbra-for-350-million-2007-09#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:04:00 +0000 Doug Caverly http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40466 Zimbra’s “About Us” page is pretty nice - there are concise statements regarding what the company does, who it works with, and how to contact it.  The page may need an overhaul, however, as it also offers an option to “View Google Map,” and word has it that Zimbra was just acquired by Yahoo.

]]> Zimbra’s “About Us” page is pretty nice – there are concise statements regarding what the company does, who it works with, and how to contact it.  The page may need an overhaul, however, as it also offers an option to “View Google Map,” and word has it that Zimbra was just acquired by Yahoo.

The “word,” as such, comes from both Kara Swisher and Michael Arrington, which should satisfy any skeptics.  There aren’t yet any press releases, but Arrington states that his information came from “a very solid source,” and Zimbra’s price was “$350 million, in cash, confirmed.”

Zimbra, which makes “open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging software,” has received a fair amount of positive attention in recent months.  Also, just six days ago, the company was able to announce the registration of its 10,000th forum member.  (“We have a very good spam moderation system, and are fairly confident that just about all of those registrations are genuine,” John Holder added on the Zimbra Blog.)

So the acquisition looks like a good move on Yahoo’s part.  And as Swisher notes, this development follows the purchases of both BlueLithium and BuzzTracker; it seems like Yahoo has decided acquisitions may be the best way to attain some success.

As always, only time will tell if the strategy works.  Meanwhile, look for a link to Yahoo Maps to appear on Zimbra’s “About Us” page.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-purchases-zimbra-for-350-million-2007-09/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/comcast-taps-zimbra-plaxo-for-smartzone-2007-05 http://www.webpronews.com/comcast-taps-zimbra-plaxo-for-smartzone-2007-05#comments Mon, 07 May 2007 18:18:44 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=37488 Comcast.net’s online communications center called SmartZone will have applications provided by a number of companies for email, voicemail, and instant messaging.

Several firms are part of today’s announcement aimed at Comcast’s customers. The SmartZone service will be rolled out later in 2007. Zimbra and Plaxo will provide messaging and address book services, respectively.

Users of SmartZone will be able to manage email and voicemail messages, IM with others (including video), and track contacts with a smart address book. A Comcast spokesperson said people will be able to customize their SmartZone portals with news, weather, and video clips.

GigaOM’s Om Malik likened the SmartZone announcement to an attempt to boost Comcast’s page views and opportunities to display richly-profitable advertising to its subscribers:

The sizzling broadband subscriber growth hasn

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/comcast-taps-zimbra-plaxo-for-smartzone-2007-05/feed 5 http://www.webpronews.com/zimbra-poses-threat-to-microsoft-2006-11 http://www.webpronews.com/zimbra-poses-threat-to-microsoft-2006-11#comments Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:44:19 +0000 Autumn Davis http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32980 Zimbra, a low-cost email program, might be more competition to Microsoft Exchange than the company had anticipated.

Zimbra, created in 2003 in Palo Alto, California, was designed by three friends who sick of being Silicon Valley slaves. They had a vision to create an email program to rival that of Microsoft Exchange, and quite possibly may be close to achieving their goal.

Three friends, who met while working at Sun Microsystems Inc, concocted Zimbra in 2003 at a coffee shop. The team of programmers was headed up by Satish Dharmaraj, a computer scientist, and supported by Ross Dargahi and Roland Schemers.

During a meeting, the three friends decided that there was room for a new email program that would serve businesses more efficiently and cheaply than Microsoft Exchange.

Over the next few months the trio scoured the Internet for free software and began to piece together a kind of program quilt. In a few months time they had managed to piece together over 40 software programs into a basic email system. By February of 2003, they released the program and a very competitive price and soon began to garner Microsoft’s business.

Zimbra’s program itself is comparable to Microsoft Exchange, in that, it allows business employees to send, receive, store, and search through the numerous emails businesses receive daily. To date, there are about 4 million Zimbra users, and that number continues to grow.

Microsoft does not seem to be threatened by Zimbra’s number of users; they have 140 million. Microsoft founder Bill Gates said, “They’ve done a good job,” but says the product “doesn’t even come close to the things that Exchange does.”

Perhaps Microsoft should worry, though, with the rise many other companies that are piecing together software to create a new program following Zimbra’s example. The companies are created and manned by software hobbyists who will work for little or no pay, they just enjoy surfing the net. The programs are then sold commerically online, saving money in marketing and sales, as opposed to Exchange’s newest program which took 400 Microsoft employees years to create.

By 2004, Zimbra had generated a profit of $4 million and spent it on purchasing a Silicon Valley office for their ten employees. They later received $30.5 million in venture funding; using a portion of the money in 2005 to purchase sponsored links on Google, which would redirect queries to their program.

Zimbra grew in leaps and bounds thanks in large part to the people who contributed to it for free, such as Carlos Vidal, who updated Zimbra’s coding to help translate the site. Now Zimbra offers it’s program in 13 different languages including English, Spanish, German, and Swedish.

Zimbra’s most notable achievement to date came when tax giant H&R Block purchased Zimbra and implemented it into 12, 000 of its branches nationwide. Microsoft has stepped up efforts to convince the company not to drop Exchange all together, and H&R Block is weighing their options carefully.

With all the success it seems that the make shift company has received so far, the creators of Zimbra say that their biggest is fear is that a company will follow their example, but create a better product. “The thing we worry the most about,” says Dharmaraj, “is that somebody’s going to copycat everything we’ve done in the last year.”

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/zimbra-poses-threat-to-microsoft-2006-11/feed 3