And yet another strategic purchase of Yahoo: they acquired leading open source eMail software and groupware provider Zimbra for $ 350 million. Zimbra was financed $ 30 Millionen venture capital through Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital. Through this acquisition Yahoo will expand its presence in universities, businesses and ISP’s.
This is a direct confrontation with Google apps of course. Yahoo! having the higher customer satisfaction (according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index) this is again very good karma for Yahoo!
Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang said:
“Zimbra’s tremendous talent and innovative technology will help to extend our core Mail offerings, further strengthening
our strong leadership position in this space. Additionally, Zimbra’s successful relationships with large ISPs are
key as we expand our worldwide partner network and continue to focus on our commitment to being the partner of choice.”
And the big differentiation, the competitive advantage, vs. Google Apps and MS Exchange is that businesses can host their own collaboration softwares like email, contacts, shared calendar and document authoring tools. And it all works in a browser. Businesses are often reluctant to use Google Apps since crucial business data is hosted on Google’s servers. Oh, Zimbra is also offered as a hosted app by the way.
It is also very likely that Zimbra technology will be integrated into Yahoo’s webmailer.
Clever move…
Official press release
Official blog post
Exchange Google Google apps groupware SaaS Search engines Software webmail Yahoo Zimbra 
