VMware
to Buy Zimbra From Yahoo In Cloud Computing Play.
VMware
said it planned to purchase Zimbra from Yahoo, a move that gives the
virtualization leader a strong, cloud-based, open-source collaboration suite
with which it could attack rival Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange e-mail
applications.
Financial
details of the acquisition were not released. However, several speculations
over the past week or so estimated the price to be about $100 million, much
lower than the $350 million Yahoo paid when it bought Zimbra in 2007.
Zimbra
is the developer of the open-source Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which includes
applications to coordinate, manage, and share e-mails from multiple vendors,
including Microsoft's Outlook, in a single interface; perform group scheduling;
and handle desktop and mobile device synchronization.
The
company currently serves 55 million mailboxes, with overall mailbox growth of
86 percent and SMB mailbox growth of 165 percent in 2009, VMware said.
The
acquisition, once it closes, would be the second open-source acquisition for
VMware.
The
company in August acquired SpringSource, a developer of applications based on
open-source technologies and a leader in such open-source communities as the
enterprise Java programming model Spring Framework, the Apache Tomcat Java
application server environment, and the Groovy and Grails dynamic language and
Web application framework.
In
a blog post on the acquisition, VMware CTO Steve Herrod wrote that Zimbra will
help VMware enhance its cloud computing offerings in two ways.
First,
Herrod wrote, it will help VMware simplify IT. Zimbra is the most popular
software for developing virtual appliances, Herrod wrote. "Once deployed
onto VMware vSphere, the Zimbra virtual appliance will automatically benefit
from the built-in VMware vSphere scalability, availability, and security
services," he wrote.
The
acquisition also lets VMware expand on its vCloud cloud computing technology
and SpringSource platform-as-a-service capabilities by adding an integrated
portfolio of applications, giving VMware a software-as-a-service offering.
The
Zimbra Collaboration Suite also competes in some ways with some of arch rival Microsoft's key products, including Office, giving VMware another tool for
competing with Microsoft.
However,
Herrod wrote in his blog, VMware does not want to alienate Microsoft Office
users from working with VMware's vSphere virtualization technology, which
competes with Microsoft's Hyper-V
"VMware
vSphere is and will continue to be an outstanding platform for the deployment
of Microsoft Exchange. We have heavily optimized our virtualization offerings
specifically for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange, and thousands of
companies are benefiting from the increased flexibility, availability, and
security that comes from running Microsoft Exchange on top of VMware
vSphere," he wrote.
VMware
brings the opportunity to become more involved in cloud computing, wrote Jim
Morrisroe, Vice President, Sales for Zimbra, in a blog on the acquisition.
"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," Morrisroe wrote. "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."
On CRN.In, By Joseph
F Kovar, ChannelWeb, January 13, 2010
Synergetics is
Awarded as the "Best. NET Training Service Provider" by
Microsoft.
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5