Zimbra to Join VMware: 2010 Will Accelerate Growth

[ZimbraCommunity]

Big news for Zimbra – we’re excited and looking forward to starting a new chapter as part of VMware. We want to thank Yahoo! for helping Zimbra usher in a period of phenomenal growth over the past 2 years.* And we are proud to have contributed to the current and future success of Yahoo! during [...]
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Zimbrablog.com » All things Zimbra

[LMStone]

Hi Mike,

That Paul Maritz is ex-Microsoft is a big plus IMHO.

He was the third person in the "three's a crowd" situation at Microsoft with Ballmer and Gates, so he left. I expect he is quite keen to compete heartily for a few of those 10,000+ seat Exchange deployments...

He has a good track record at building companies and VMware's board has given him a wide berth from which to reinvigorate VMware after the departure of VMware's co-founder and CEO Diane Greene.

Virtualization software is effectively commodity priced now; VMware is pretty much the last holdout with five-figure pricing for three-server acceleration kits. Citrix, Sun, etc, are moving up the food chain to supplying higher value-added infrastructure (cloud computing) services as well as application (SaaS) services, so Zimbra fits in nicely with that strategy for VMware.

Plus, VMware's model of giving away base products for free to seed the market and enable sales of higher value-added products and services mirrors Zimbra's model.

I only hope VMware doesn't try to change too much at Zimbra too quickly. I spent thirteen years in investment banking doing tech and media mergers and acquisitions, and one reason so many acquisitions fail is that the buyer too often thinks "they know better" (they bought the company after all, right?). The buyer starts changing things they shouldn't, encouraging all the good people at the acquired company to move on elsewhere.

So, I hope you and everyone else at Zimbra signed looonnnnggg, non-terminable employment agreements as part of this deal!

Looking forward to even better things coming from Zimbra!

All the best,
Mark

P.S. One feature where Exchange shines against most other groupware platforms is replication. To be able to do stateful HA with two Exchange servers across a WAN in two different data centers means we have a few customers for whom Zimbra is a non-starter. The WAN HA capability was "promised" back in the ZCS 4.0 days; it sure would help us sell to more demanding mission-critical accounts if you got a budget to implement that feature...

[Rich Graves]

P.S. One feature where Exchange shines against most other groupware platforms is replication

Either VMWare or their parent EMC would be happy to provide that.

[Jason Hung]

This is a huge relief and great news! VMware is a company that has dedicated itself to the server industry. Hopefully, we will see Zimbra integrate better with VMware products since most of our servers are configured with a VMware stack.

[langs]

I really don't see any down side of this, I think it's a great outcome not only for Zimbra itself but also for their customers as Vmware are way more positioned to understand Zimbra and what we as customers want.

The focus will be in the right area's and rather then just take from Zimbra like yahoo wanted to, I think VMware can bring good feature addins to the table like replication.

[stiller]

Originally Posted by Rich Graves

Either VMWare or their parent EMC would be happy to provide that.

WAN data replication using generic SAN/Virtualization technology is a different creature with much higher demands.
For many situations, the higher TCO would defeat the purpose of moving to Zimbra in the first place.

[uxbod]

Perfect timing then I guess : VMware Announces the Availability of VMware Goâ„¢ - Virtualization for SMBs in Three Easy Steps

[sevilla]

i dont know why, but i feel zimbra Open Source will be disappearing slowly and becoming only a comercial product.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by sevilla

i dont know why, but i feel zimbra Open Source will be disappearing slowly and becoming only a comercial product.

Then you're mistaken.

[LMStone]

Originally Posted by sevilla

i dont know why, but i feel zimbra Open Source will be disappearing slowly and becoming only a comercial product.

I personally would doubt that as well too.

VMware learned years ago they needed a free product to remain competitive and stimulate sales of the commercial product, so they made GSX free (the offering has now become ESXi). Xen Server, now free too, includes the equivalent of Live VMotion, which VMware only includes in their paid products.

Indeed, there could be the possibility that the Zimbra free Open Source edition might even get more attention under VMware.

We'll see though, won't we?

All the best,
Mark