ISEdb.COM

Yahoo has recently decided on a late Christmas present to VMWare, market leader in software virtualization, to sell the e-mail platform Zimbra for half of the $350 million it paid for it in 2007.

Zimbra is a user-friendly mail service that was founded back in 2004 and has seen a constant growing user base. When Yahoo decided for the buyout in 2007, it planned to use its technology to integrate it in services such as Yahoo Calendar and, of course, Yahoo Mail, without doubt one of the search engine’s most valued possessions.

But after Yahoo’s refusal to the Microsoft buyout offer, the newly appointed Carol Bartz had to make some drastic decisions in order to narrow its focus on the things it does best. Zimbra was therefore put forward as one of the assets which would be sold to a third party in order to raise liquidity for the world’s second largest search engine.

If price rumors prove true, the deal would be a bargain for VMware especially considering the constantly growing user base of Zimbra, whose subscriber count has grown by a very respectable 86% during the course of last year, to reach the 55 million figure.

When, back in September, Yahoo announced that it was looking for buyers, analysts advanced the usual hypotheses, putting Google and Comcast at the top of the list of likely interested parties. The announcement earlier this week that it would be VMWare to close the deal comes as a bit of a surprise; the virtualization giant said Zimbra would help it sell cloud-computing services to corporations.

“In this way, the outstanding Zimbra team and their technology will be an important element in expanding our VMware vCloud strategy to deliver a well integrated portfolio of compute, application development, and core IT service clouds,” VMware’s Chief Technology Officer Steve Herrod said in a blog post.

VMware spokesmen said they expect the acquisition to take place within the first quarter of the current year. With earning reports due to be published in two weeks, this will be hardly the last business Yahoo will have to unload within the year if it plans to get back on its feet and continue the battle with the Google titan.