Last September, Yahoo acquired Zimbra, an enterprise Web email company. Zimbra is an impressive product. It does e-mail in a browser better than you've ever seen it. The company also makes a business-class e-mail server, and many of its services interconnect to Microsoft's e-mail products--the Exchange server and the Outlook client. Nonetheless, it is hard, at first glance, to see how Zimbra fits into Yahoo's business. Yahoo previously acquired OddPost, another dazzling e-mail technology company, and it was still in the process of rolling out OddPost-powered improvements to its millions of Yahoo Mail users when it acquired Zimbra.
But when I sat down with Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj to get a demo of the new offline e-mail client (very impressive), the importance of Zimbra to Yahoo became clear. Zimbra is not just an e-mail play. It's a nascent productivity suite. While aside from its well-developed e-mail offering it's still a very young product, it looks like it could eventually become a competitor to Google Docs and Google Apps (Google's consumer and business productivity suites, respectively) and potentially a competitor to Microsoft Office. On the other hand, if Microsoft acquires Zimbra, then this initiative will be in serious jeopardy, since it's doubtful Microsoft would scrap its own developing online suite products in favor of Zimbra's.
But when I sat down with Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj to get a demo of the new offline e-mail client (very impressive), the importance of Zimbra to Yahoo became clear. Zimbra is not just an e-mail play. It's a nascent productivity suite. While aside from its well-developed e-mail offering it's still a very young product, it looks like it could eventually become a competitor to Google Docs and Google Apps (Google's consumer and business productivity suites, respectively) and potentially a competitor to Microsoft Office. On the other hand, if Microsoft acquires Zimbra, then this initiative will be in serious jeopardy, since it's doubtful Microsoft would scrap its own developing online suite products in favor of Zimbra's.
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