Yahoo Acquire Open-Source Email Solution Zimbra
Yahoo announced today the acquizition Zimbra, an open-source email solotions & collaboration solutions provider, for $350 million in cash.
Zimbra develops email servers as well as hosted solutions for organizations, businesses and universities. This purchase was meant in order to expand Yahoo’s capabilities to offer services “in universities, businesses and through ISPs by enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain.”
This move was quite possibly made following the wise in popularity of such Gmail services over the past summer among universities and businesses.
GigaOM reviewed Zimbra’s solution a while back, here’s his review.
Just let me mention that there is one independent option of open source collaboration for SMEs and ISPs left — Open-Xchange.
They recently announced another big win in Europe.
Open-Xchange Inc., the leading provider of open source collaboration software, announced today a new strategic partnership with Hostpoint AG, the leading hosting provider in Switzerland. Later this year, Hostpoint will replace the webmailer for their 250,000 e-mail accounts with a new webmail module from Open-Xchange, which uses an innovative AJAX web interface to deliver new features and improved usability. Hostpoint will also offer additional Open-Xchange modules enabling users to seamlessly upgrade to a full-featured collaboration solution.
Following the partnership with 1&1 Internet Inc., the world’s largest hosting provider, this partnership further validates Open-Xchange’s strategy to serve the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market: Open-Xchange is committed to supply the SME market with world class email and collaboration solutions through Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web-hosting companies like Hostpoint. This partnership is therefore intended to push Hostpoint into the fast-growing ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) market.
For more information, please visit open-xchange.com