Rumor: VMware to acquire Zimbra? Say what?!

January 6, 2010  |  Blunders

TechTarget as well as hundreds of Tweets report a tech rumor that VMware has bid for Yahoo’s Zimbra, an open source email and collaboration company.  I’m sure this has left VMware customers scratching their heads. According to TechTarget, “Zimbra, which sold to Yahoo Inc. in 2007 for $350 million, boasts 50 million paid seats for its email and collaboration product, both hosted and on-premise. VMware Inc. has not confirmed the deal; the Monday report by the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” said it was unclear how much VMware would pay for the company.”

I’d have to agree that with all the crap Webmail-type of interfaces out there, email software like Microsoft would be a much better fit.  Everyone is trying to compete with Google, GMAIL and Google Apps — that would make sense then to try an open source model that have real enterprise chops.

I’ve used Zimbra with a client I contract for called rPath, the Web interface is fabulous and allows for great remote capabitlities.  Stay tuned for some interesting developments.