Yahoo Buys Zimbra for $350 Million
Yahoo is set to make yet another acquisition–this time of white-label open-source email provider Zimbra. Sources close to the deal said that the Internet portal will pay $350 million, considerably upward of its most recent valuation, for the email and calendar provider.
Backed by Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Partners, San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra’s clients include Comcast, many ISPs and a number of colleges. The Wall Street Journal’s Robert A. Guth wrote about the company last year.
In a post by Om Malik on his GigaOm blog, he noted: “The Zimbra-built email client marries the email and calendaring applications with visual voicemail, and eventually will tie into other Comcast triple-play services.”
Yahoo’s been on a bit of an acquistion roll of late, grabbing behavioral ad network BlueLithium for $300 million earlier this month and news aggregator BuzzTracker last week for $5 million.
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang continues on his 100-day march–and now seems to be making a number of interesting moves.
The acquisition was within Yahoo Senior Vice President Brad “Peanut Butter Manifesto” Garlinghouse’s unit.
Yahoo is briefing reporters today on the deal, but left BoomTown off the list. Big mistake, as it just makes us cranky and bored!
Comments
I wonder if it will take 2+ years for Yahoo to integrate Zimbra into Yahoo!, like it did with OddPost…
Looks like Yahoo! is trying to compete with Google Apps now…I wonder if they will buy an anti-spam ASP company/service now, like Google did with Postini?
Posted by John Lin at September 17th, 2007 at 1:04 pmVery interesting. Surprised that Google did not pick them up. Zimbra has significant traction in SMB. Interested to find out what Yahoo’s plan is for them.
Posted by Omar Nawaz at September 17th, 2007 at 1:12 pmWonder if this is going to make Zimbra hosting providers and other partners like http://www.01.com more valuable, or what’s going to happen with them?
Posted by Marshal Mather at September 17th, 2007 at 1:14 pmMy first thought was “Why?” Yahoo is currently struggling with a lack of vision, and then all of a sudden in less than a month they shell out 1/2 a billion in cash without defining where they are going. Of course the obvious play here is against Google - I wonder what the revenue stream will look like?
Posted by Peter Cranstone at September 17th, 2007 at 1:20 pmHead over to Yahoo!’s corporate blog (Yodel Anecdotal) to read said Garlinghouse’s official post about the deal.
Posted by Nicki Dugan at September 17th, 2007 at 2:15 pmFinally Yahoo! is coming back to its Technology roots. Very interesting buy. Seems Jerry is taking on to competition head on instead of flanking. It is a sign of renewed self-confidence in Yahoo! Hope the momentum continues.
Posted by Nirav Bhavsar at September 17th, 2007 at 7:57 pmZimbra’s calendaring and general collaboration tools are fairly robust. Given Google’s Apps play in the SMB, and Zimbra’s slick web interface (the ajax toolkit is fairly popular, and will enhance the Yahoo UI toolkit), it makes sense to beef up their presence in that market. Let’s see if Yahoo continues the Open Source push with Zimbra, and continues to court the developer market.
Posted by Arjun Chopra at September 18th, 2007 at 4:36 pm@John Lin, If they hope to compete in the App department a Zoho purchase may help accelerate the dream. Their writer is much more elegant than Google’s from the Writely acquisition.
Posted by Robert MacEwan at September 23rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm