This week, after many rumors and much speculation, VMware officially announced plans to purchase Zimbra from the Yahoo! Corporation.

Zimbra is a powerful commercial open source email server application. One of the leading benefits of the Zimbra platform is it’s cross-platform compatibility with Windows, Linux and Mac clients. Notably, it also offers tight integration with Microsoft Outlook, which is used extensively by businesses small and large. In addition to the core email functions, Zimbra also boasts extensive shared calendaring, address books, wiki document manager, even instant messaging capabilities.

At SUREclient we have been using Zimbra internally and implementing it as an effective solution for our clients for several years. As partners with both Zimbra and VMware, this announcement comes as great news to us. While Yahoo! has made great strides increasing the market adoption of Zimbra, having the product in the hands of innovators like VMware makes the future of Zimbra brighter than ever. Assuming that VMware puts the same quality and level of research and development into Zimbra as they have put into their line of virtualization products, I can see only good coming of this business arrangement.

In addition to what this acquisition will do to enhance Zimbra, this also opens up some interesting observations concerning where the overall VMware strategy is headed as well. By investing in an email server application such as Zimbra, VMware has extended their reach from primarily a virtualization and infrastructure management provider into application platforms as well.

For more information on exactly what this means to VMware, and for an explanation of their reasoning for making this strategic move, read Steve Herrod’s (CTO at VMware) blog post – http://bit.ly/6e68rA.

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If you are interested in learning how VMware virtualization or Zimbra email and collaboration could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

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Tim Zeimann is an information technology specialist and consummate problem-solver. He founded SUREclient in 2005, and currently holds CCA, CISSP, MCSE, VCP, Security+ and Network+ certifications.