(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Virtualization solutions provider VMware (www.vmware.com) announced on Tuesday it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire open source email and collaboration software vendor Zimbra (www.zimbra.com) from Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), according to a post by VMware CTO Steve Herrod on the VMware blog.
The deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010.
According to the terms of the deal, VMware will acquire all Zimbra technology and intellectual property.
Yahoo! will continue to use the technology in its services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.
Rumors began to circulate last week that Yahoo! was looking to sell Zimbra to VMware. Yahoo! purchased Zimbra in 2007 for $350 million to help strengthen its own email service at the time.
VMware said the acquisition will help simplify the data center, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.
Zimbra currently has over 55 million mailboxes. Run as an independent product division of Yahoo!, Zimbra saw a 2009 mailbox growth of 86 percent overall and 165 percent among small and medium business customers.
“Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud,” says Brian Byun, vice president and general manager of cloud services of VMware. “It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider.”
Once the acquisition is completed, VMware said it will support Zimbra products and open source projects while using Zimbra products for vSphere-based cloud infrastructure, along with Microsoft, IBM and other messaging and collaboration solutions.
