VMware waves goodbye to Zimbra

Email biz to merge with Telligent

By Drew Cullen, 15th July 2013

VMware has offloaded Zimbra less than four years after buying the email-cum-collabware business unit from Yahoo! Terms are undisclosed.

The buyer is Telligent, a developer of enterprise social software. It will merge its software into Zimbra, and the goal is to deliver a "unified social collaboration suite designed for the post-PC era".

This may be a concatenation of buzzwords, but the pitch has worked - Telligent / Zimbra Mk 4 is backed by Intel Capital, NXT Capital Venture Finance, BDCA, Hall Financial Group and VMware.

Telligent's boss Patrick Brandt will run the combined business. He says the acquisition presents an opportunity to "return Zimbra to its roots as an independent collaboration software leader with a vibrant open source community".

Certainly, Zimbra (Mk1) has seemed a little unloved since it was bought by Yahoo! for an astounding $350m (Mk2) in 2007. VMware snapped up Zimbra (Mk3) in January 2010 for "considerably less" money.

At the time VMware hailed Zimbra as a "great example of the type of scalable 'cloud era' solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud".

The company envisaged Zimbra as a component for an "expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider".

The idea was to simplify IT especially for smaller businesses. Oh well. ®

5 ways to reduce advertising network latency

11 Reader Comments

Microsoft’s Cloud OS

System Center Virtual Machine manager and how this product allows the level of virtualization abstraction to move from individual physical computers and clusters to unifying the whole Data Centre as an abstraction layer.

5 ways to prepare your advertising infrastructure for disaster

Being prepared allows your brand to greatly improve your advertising infrastructure performance and reliability that, in the end, will boost confidence in your brand.

Reg Reader Research: SaaS based Email and Office Productivity Tools

Read this Reg reader report which provides advice and guidance for SMBs towards the use of SaaS based email and Office productivity tools.

Email delivery: Hate phishing emails? You'll love DMARC

DMARC has been created as a standard to help properly authenticate your sends and monitor and report phishers that are trying to send from your name..