Yahoo Acquires Zimbra For $350 million in Cash

[RAV TUX]

September 17 2007

Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com/) this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed. Our coverage of Zimbra goes back (http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/09/12/zimbra-webajax-based-outlook-application/) to 2005. They gained wide exposure (http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/10/05/the-companies-of-web-20-part-1/) at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Recently they launched offline functionality (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/26/zimbra-to-lauch-desktop-application-with-full-offline-functionality/).
The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/25/zimbra-6-million-paying-customers/) back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/06/twelve-million-new-customers-for-zimbra-partnership-with-comcast/) that brings another 12 million potential subscribers.
This was a very, very smart acquisition. In one quick move Yahoo is now in the race with Google for the next generation online/offline office suite. I would not be surprised to see them pick up Zoho (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zoho) next. That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.
Update: Here is the Yahoo press release (http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi-content=NEWS_VIEW_POPUP_TYPE&newsId=20070917006387&ndmHsc=v2*A1190026800000*B1190084457000*DgroupByDa te*J1*N1000837&newsLang=en&beanID=202776713&viewID=news_view_popup) and Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj’sblog post (http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2007/09/yahoo_acquires_zimbra.html)on the acquisition. And here’s the Yahoo official blog post (http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/09/17/zimbra-is-so-damn-cool/).
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/breaking-yahoo-acquires-zimbra-for-350-million

[RAV TUX]

The beginning of the post from the Yahoo blog:


Zimbra is so damn cool (http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/09/17/zimbra-is-so-damn-cool/)

September 17th, 2007 at 1:21 pm by Brad Garlinghouse (http://yodel.yahoo.com/author/brad-garlinghouse/), Communications & Communities
In Trends & News (http://yodel.yahoo.com/category/trends-news/)
If you’re a student at Georgia Tech or an employee at Digg or Mozilla.org, you know just how excellent your email and group calendaring experience is. That’s because it’s powered by Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com/), creator of an innovative Ajax-based mail client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, search and VoIP into an incredibly cool browser-based interface. So cool that we’ve just entered an agreement to acquire Zimbra for $350 million. (http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=264388)


continue the article here:
http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/09/17/zimbra-is-so-damn-cool/

[rfruth]

Yahoo and Google keep batting it back and forth & all msft can do is sit there watching / dreaming ...:)

[Macchi]

Zimbra has an interesting community edition for their collaboration suite and I have been hoping that a positive development for their company would also mean improved resources for the Open Sorce Edition. As we know Open Source is a good way for smaller companies to get in the market - if they have a creative business model.

I really see the urgent need for a good collaboration suite such as Zimbra in a "turnkey" solution that harmonizes with Ubuntu clients and servers.

The problem is that now I don't really know what is going to happen. On one hand it is possible that Zimbra will obtain more resources for spreading their solutions, even within the open source community. On the other hand, Yahoo's priority is probably to get stronger in collaboration solutions for the big share of Windows workstations, in order to compete with Microsoft - MSN and Google. Thus there is also a risk that the open source edition would not be emphasized.

What do you think is going to happen?

[RAV TUX]

Zimbra has an interesting community edition for their collaboration suite and I have been hoping that a positive development for their company would also mean improved resources for the Open Sorce Edition. As we know Open Source is a good way for smaller companies to get in the market - if they have a creative business model.

I really see the urgent need for a good collaboration suite such as Zimbra in a "turnkey" solution that harmonizes with Ubuntu clients and servers.

The problem is that now I don't really know what is going to happen. On one hand it is possible that Zimbra will obtain more resources for spreading their solutions, even within the open source community. On the other hand, Yahoo's priority is probably to get stronger in collaboration solutions for the big share of Windows workstations, in order to compete with Microsoft - MSN and Google. Thus there is also a risk that the open source edition would not be emphasized.

What do you think is going to happen?
Cutting off the Open Source aspect of Zimbra would be like cutting their feet off, it just wouldn't make logical sense.

I see this as a positive infusion for Zimbra overall.

[SunnyRabbiera]

yeh but yahoo is so open source unfriendly, I would not be surprised if zimbra is made 100% useless to linux users quite soon... better fork it before its too late.

[RAV TUX]

yeh but yahoo is so open source unfriendly, I would not be surprised if zimbra is made 100% useless to linux users quite soon... better fork it before its too late.You may have a point there.