It is no secret VMware has its focus on cloud computing. VMware is presenting itself as the datacenter enabler for cloud services. A short while ago VMware acquired Springsource, a java development framework. Also Vmware changed it’s logo to get rid of the VM’s. These are all signs of VMware changing focus from hypervisor to services and applications around and on top of the hypervisor/cloud technologies they provide.
Today VMware announced it has bought Zimbra – an open source collaboration suite – from Yahoo!. In five year time over 55 million paid mailboxes.
More on Zimbra (Zimbrablog):
Zimbra Collaboration Suite has become a great open source platform because of the people who provide input and guidance each day. Our recent launch of ZCS 6.0 was a direct result of community and customer feedback. ZCS 6.0 includes powerful new collaboration features for enterprise users, new capabilities for system administrators, better mobile device management, and the ability to manage Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites (find out what’s new in 6.0 here)…
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.
Steve Herrod CTO of VMware just posted an article on blogs.vmware.com/console where he explains why VMware bought Zimbra, in short it says: It helps Vmware to “Simplify IT” (as in their mission) and it expands the portfolio for Cloud partners. Simplify IT by presenting Virtual Appliances build for virtualization and the cloud. Expanding the portfolio for cloud partners to be albe to deliver SaaS (Software as a Service) on top of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service: vSphere) and a PaaS (Platform as a Service: Springsource).
New opportunities to come for sure, maybe competition for Google Apps/Wave?
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