[Rich Graves]

I for one (and I do seem to be the only one) welcome our new Yahoo! overlords.

Gartner doesn't know jack. They can be helpful to outline large-scale trends, both technological zeitgeist and regulatory things like SOX and HIPAA, but statements like "we think it unlikely that it will retain support for the fee-based on-premises version of Zimbra in the long run" were made in a complete vacuum. Gartner has no competence to make such judgments. One of the things that excites me about Zimbra is that there is no conflict between the way that Zimbra runs SaaS and the way that it runs in the enterprise. Exchange has until very recently had terrible trouble scaling to SaaS because of its architecture; carrier-grade email packages (which I don't know much about, because I've never been in that market) have never worked for the enterprise. But Zimbra does both.

I'd agree that current Zimbra SaaS providers have reason to worry in the long run -- if I were one, I'd be looking to be acquired by Yahoo -- but as a (very small) enterprise customer, I'm happy with this turn of events.

Given the origins of each company and the identity of each company's founder's, the notion that Yahoo is a dinosaur and Zimbra is a startup upstart whose culture is in jeopardy is laughable. Look, Roland and the Yahoo founders were both at Stanford at the same time, but had rather different job descriptions.

Zimbra was never a one-trick startup like MySpace or FaceBook or eGroups or YouTube or pre-1995 Yahoo. It is the fourth of fifth startup from people with *very* serious industry experience. The Zimbra founders were already reasonably financially secure and quite mature before they started the company. Their vision is quite succinctly described in the "Fixing Email" whitepaper. Nothing about the Yahoo acquisition changes that vision.

The long-term risk to Zimbra I always saw came from patent trolls. For me, the Yahoo acquisition and large-scale ISP deals greatly mitigates that worry.

Yeah, there's a risk that being folded into a larger company with its own interests might dampen innovation, interop, and choice (the most obvious, but ultimately meaningless, example being Google search -> Yahoo search). But Zimbra has always been about serious people applying solid engineering principles and best-of-breed open-source applications to the problem of Fixing Email, not about some teenager making an ultimately unsustainable splash with some truly novel web 2.0 site (for example).