Yahoo buys Zimbra. I heard Zimbra present in the Enterprise 2006 event and found them impressive. This is a noteworthy acquisition. With this yahoo gears to get in race with Google for the next generation online/offline office suite, represented as Google Gears. Zimbra had some six million users as of May. Yahoo Mail has more than 250 million.
Zimbra currently offers open source e-mail, calendaring, and contact management solutions that can be used both on- and offline, and services small businesses and educational institutions. Zimbra’s widges named "Zimlets," tie information from other web services into Zimbra's suite. The Zimlets essentially act as widgets that can be customized and placed around Zimbra's e-mail or calendar tools so that users can access information quickly and conveniently.Zimbra believes that Yahoo's broad reach with its advertising and content network, combined with Zimlets, will make for a nice pairing. May be Zoho is next in line to be acquired. That would take them head-on with google docs.
Read the Yahoo press release and Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj’s blog post on the acquisition. And here’s the Yahoo official blog post .
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