What does Georgia Tech, Digg, and Mozilla.org have in common? According to Yodel Anecdotal: Yahoo’s company blog, the email and group calendaring system is all powered by Zimbra. And because why it is so “damn cool” as described by Yahoo!’s Brad Garlinghouse, the search engine just bought the open source email/calendaring company for $350 million in cash.
This acquisition comes at a time that Google is gearing to develop further online office suite applications and when Microsoft is supposedly developing and testing web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well.
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5 is the current release by Zimbra. And despite the acquisition, version 5.0 will is not expected to be delayed.
For those who are current Zimbra customers or want to learn more about how the acquisition, there is a Q&A available and Network Edition Trial on the Zimbra website.
The company raised $30.5 million over the course of three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich according to TechCrunch.
