VMware has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire email and collaboration software vendor Zimbra from Yahoo!. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
VMware said that the acquisition will further its mission of taking complexity out of the datacentre, desktop, application development and core IT services and delivering a more efficient and new approach to IT.
Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will purchase all Zimbra technology and intellectual property and Yahoo! can continue to utilise the Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.
Brian Byun, vice president and general manager of cloud services at VMware, said: Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. 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. We are excited to welcome the Zimbra team and community to the VMware family.
As an independent Yahoo! product division, Zimbra is an open source email and collaboration service with over 55 million mailboxes. Its products offer enterprise feature set, interoperability with legacy email environments and have been deployed across small and large environments.
VMware said that it plans to support existing Zimbra products and open source efforts while optimising Zimbra products for vSphere-based cloud infrastructure, alongside Microsoft, IBM and other messaging and collaboration services.
Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Yahoo!, said: The Zimbra technology has played and will continue to play an important role in our communications services products. The technology is core to Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar and a key differentiator for these leading products. The customers and partners of Zimbra’s industry-leading product and successful enterprise business will be well served with VMware.
The acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010.
