VMware to acquire Zimbra

VMware has just announced that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo! Hmmm.. Didn’t I just hear that Oracle just switched to Zimbra?

Many are asking why? According to Zimbra:

"We believe that the shift toward cloud computing and virtualization will continue to change the industry landscape and revolutionize how the IT industry builds, deploys and uses software.   Zimbra is excited to be joining our open source friends at SpringSource, and becoming another cornerstone in an impressive suite of VMware products.  The VMware platform now integrates virtualization, middleware and applications – and enables the decoupling of applications from traditional concepts of linear hardware scaling.   Private and/or public cloud computing networks can work together and applications can be deployed and managed seamlessly across those clouds.  Zimbra products were designed from the ground up with virtualization and the cloud in mind, with a modular architecture and APIs to allow distributed access to data and storage.   Email and collaboration services have always been ubiquitous to organizations, but now the barriers to transitioning them to efficient virtualized environments will be much more seamless."

Check out the demo videos of Zimbra.

Here are more documents available to learn about this acquisition: this FAQ, the announcement press release, a blog post from VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and a blog post from Zimbra general manager Jim Morrisroe.