Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra For $350 Million: Gearing For Online Office Application Competition

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 online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well. Yahoo! is now on the bandwagon and will bring Yahoo! new customers and be able to benefit from the open-source community in terms of email software development.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.5 is the current release by Zimbra, but with the announcement of the acquisition, version 5.0 will not 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.