Yahoo Acquires Zimbra for $350 Million

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo has acquired the open source office suite Zimbra for $350 Million in cash. Zimbra has been in and out of the news over the last couple of years for their office suite, and recently launched offline capabilities. "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 back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers."

Yahoo & Open Source?

Perhaps I've missed something but isn't Yahoo usually not too fond of open source stuff? Perhaps they're changing their ways? Or maybe they just want to make Zimbra proprietary to kill any open souce competition? I guess time will only tell on this one...

Re:Yahoo & Open Source? -- Let's fork guys!

No need to fork Zimbra, we have a light weight alternative in Bongo (http://www.bongo-project.org/) that we'd love to have more people help out with.

As well as Bongo, there is also Citadel doing similar things, Kolab doing completely different things, and a couple of web-only groupware systems.

Zimbra's by no means the only game in town.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source? -- Let's fork guys!

I did not know this http://www.bongo-project.org/ [bongo-project.org] existed. I swear to God...I have never heard of Bongo at all. One wonders what else I do not know about.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

Perhaps I've missed something but isn't Yahoo usually not too fond of open source stuff? Perhaps they're changing their ways? Or maybe they just want to make Zimbra proprietary to kill any open souce competition? I guess time will only tell on this one...

Yahoo exists thanks to Open Source.

It is still the poster child for FreeBSD. They started on FreeBSD and kept using it to this date.

They are offering free open source SDKs etc on http://developer.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]

They certainly have a problem in PR department if a slashdot user thinks Yahoo is not fond of open source.

Re:Yahoo & Open Source?

That would be correct. Note how Google has Google Labs and Google Code... If they're not playing to the slashdot/digg crowd, then they're not playing in the same game as Google!

Not surprising in the least.

Last year I setup a dual box zimbra system to replace some rather high traffic imap servers that served ~1200 users with 550+ concurrent during periods of heavy load, with a *lot* of incoming and outgoing mail peppered full of attachments. I was pretty skeptical at first about how the system would hold up, but not only was it solid, in many ways it was much faster than the previous system, especially with the mailboxes that were huge in size.

Solid backups, good inegration with third party software, easy extension and a solid upgrade in place system makes for a great product. It didn't hurt that their techs were responsive and actually knew about all the software (much of it OSS) that their product was based on. I'm suprised that is Yahoo though, figured it would be Apple to turn into their enterprise mail platform.

Agreed

Zimbra is by far the best at what it does. It's better than every web based Groupware (is that the proper name?) software out there. Let's just hope Yahoo doesn't run it into the ground. I don't see why they'd actually want or need this software. Yahoo already has lot's of talented programmers and pretty decent software. The Zimbra code is probably useless to them and all of Zimbra's features and quality could be copied without owning them. It isn't like Google buying Youtube (i.e. buying established users) because Zimbra really only has a cult following. For how good it is, it really isn't that popular. This purchase really confuses me. Like I said, I hope they actually do something with Zimbra instead of buying it and letting it sit on the shelf.

Wasted oppotunity

They really should have taken a look at zombo.com. There are many more possibilities there, according to the sources I've queried.

the irony

interetsing to note that zimbra uses google for mail search ... :P

Ugggh...Comcast

inked a deal with Comcast

This had me interested until I read that they made a deal with the devil.

Not an "Office Suite"

This is not yet another competitor for Microsoft Office or Open Office. (God knows we don't need any more!) Zimbra is a little more specialized, concentrating on email, scheduling, and other "collaboration" stuff.

I seem to recall trying Zimbra a little while back and not being terribly impressed. Yahoo seems to have a history of buying companies for the sake of products or services they would have been better off developing themselves. Anybody remember broadcast.com?

But what happens if MSFT buys Yahoo?

oooo, this could turn out bad. There has been a lot of talk of Microsoft buying Yahoo in an attempt to catch up to Google. And if MSFT does buy Yahoo, thereby acquiring Zimbra, it is another FOSS code base that we might lose time and effort on.

Of course, we don't want to speculate needlessly about a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. This is exactly the wedge that we see Microsoft driving into the FOSS community with their deals with Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. Undoubtedly, one of the benefits to Microsoft of the Yahoo acquisition talks is that many members of the FOSS community will shy away from Yahoo, simply because they might become a Microsoft property. And even people who like Microsoft and its products might hesitate to use Yahoo products and services if they see Yahoo stumbling.

So I would like to see Yahoo get its financial house in order. I am really fond of Google and its products and services, and I tend to use Google tools and properties more than the Yahoo counterparts. But I wouldn't want to have competition in this area reduced to only two major players: Microsoft and Google.

So come on, Yahoo, get your act together! And stop talking with Microsoft about acquisitions! Ick!

Ooooh....

Zimbra.
It took me a while to not read that as "Yahoo buys Zambia for $350M."
Sure enough the high price was what tipped me off to my mistake.

"Zimbra"?

I swear, sometimes it's hard to tell who has dumber names: Web 2.0 startups, or Open Source projects.

It's like the Dot-com Bubble all over again. I can't wait until next week's story, about how WUB.com has bought Flizmo for $X50 Thrillion...

The special Yahoo! touch

Every website Yahoo has created, and every service, you can just feel their touch. The touch of incompetence. Their web mail client sucks. Their image sharing service sucked. Their search engine sucked (at least until Google came along).

Yahoo is an incompetent company and everything that they have done and I have seen sucked.

"Open Source"?

I don't really care for the licensing terms, as long as the source is available for private perusal.

But opening up your source-code repository is not quite cutting it to me. Where be the releases? I want to see zimbra-N.K.tar.bz2, along with an earlier zimbra-N.K-1.tar.bz2, and, maybe, the preview of zimbra-N+1.beta.tar.bz2.

That's Open Source...

Pronto! is better (biased opinion)

The flash based Pronto! email, calendar, VoIP, media, rss reader, jabber, pbx and more client we make is light, fast, and scales much better. The install can be downloaded, installed and configured in less than 30 minutes. The entire package is under 15 megs single binary with more than 20 operating systems/hardware combinations supported. There is a live demo system running at [talktoip.com]http://talktoip.com/ [talktoip.com] if you'd like to create an account and see for yourself. If you would rather run the software to test you can get it in the CommuniGate Pro package from [communigate.com]ftp://ftp.communigate.com/Pub/CommuniGatePro/5.1 [communigate.com] . 5.1.12 is the most recent stable version.

As the subject says I am biased for being directly affiliated with the developers of Pronto!

Uhh

Another case of RIAA selling shoddy, lame products.
My friendly neighbouring pirates are distributing high-quality, premium versions of the same songs that are fully compatible with everything!

No wonder that RIAA can't compete with them, as RIAA is selling cheap knockoffs, while pirates are offering the real goods.

Why Did They Buy It?

Why did they buy it if it's open source? Couldn't they just download it?

Zimbra was never truly free anyway

Anyone who seriously looked at Zimbra already knows that it has a couple of limitations, one of which is that the "open source" version is quite stripped down. If you want the fully functional version you have to pay for it. It is also extremely resource hungry, carrying with it an entire Java application server, an entire copy of MySQL, etc. etc. etc.

That having been said, Zimbra does have a gorgeous UI and it'll be interesting to see what Yahoo does with it.

So what's left for those of us who want to run feature-rich groupware servers on our own hardware? Check out Citadel -- http://www.citadel.org [citadel.org]. It is a mature, stable, and feature-rich platform with email, calendars, address books, bulletin boards, instant messaging, GroupDAV for rich clients, and a very nice AJAX web UI. Full support for Outlook will arrive later this year, too. The best part is that unlike Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter), the whole system is released under the GPLv3. Just like the Ubuntu folks said a few years ago, "There is no 'enterprise' version. We make our very best work available to everyone under the same terms."

More interested in...

To be honest, i was more interested in seeing where this got: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/ [sourceforge.net]

It looked pretty good and has some decent names behind it (now, that wasnt always the case). Plus its kinda functional in both directions in that they were bringing out a native exchange connector for evolution.

I remember writing a whole concept article about a replacement for mail a while ago based on the whole tagging concept but could never get it started. The motivation though was really about the lack of collab suites that exist in the OSS arena. I dont really consider Zimbra to be all that OSS myself though.

ZCS has a long way to go

I've been using the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) for about three weeks, and it has a loooong way to go. It's slow and lacks user interface basics like "Undo." The next version just adds more half-implemented bells and whistles.

Hopefully Yahoo will buy Zimbra a few usability engineers. And an accessibility consultant. And a fleet of documentation writers. If their track record holds (del.icio.us, flickr), this will be good for folks like me who could care less what dotcom is at the helm, but just want the product to be less mediocre.

Scalix?

When I replaced OpenGroupware at my church about a year ago, I looked at both Zimbra and Scalix. Both seemed to do about the same thing, in about the same way. I installed both and tried them out. Functionally, on the web client, I couldn't tell the difference. From an installation point-of-view, Scalix won hands-down. (The Outlook plugin was a little testy, but once the replication stuff was properly setup, it's all been good.) The point that really "sold" the system to me was that I needed the system to do delegation, and, at the time, I could NOT get that working with Zimbra. On Scalix, I wouldn't say it "just worked," but I was able to stumble my way through the tickboxes to a working setup. (In the version I have, I seem to remember needing to frob some things on the web-interface side. I also seem to remember that this would go away in the next release.) Anyway, Scalix is out there, works very well, and is completely free, including the Outlook plugin.

I was just going to link their URL, and I find that they've been bought by Xandros, which might have been sort of worrying on its own (being as Xandros is such a small player in the field, I guess that implies something about the size of Scalix as well), but they recently did a "patent" deal with Microsoft. Oops. I may have a problem now.