VMware cloud ambitions could lead to Zimbra acquisition

Yahoo could be on the verge of selling off its Zimbra unit to virtualization software giant VMware, according to a report coming out of All Things Digital, a tech division of The Wall Street Journal.

So far, both parties are still denying the rumored acquisition.

So what is Zimbra? It’s an open source, Web 2.0 collaboration and messaging software system for enterprises and service providers. You can think of it as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, and the software is already available as a VMware virtual appliance.

Rumors have been circulating for a while now that Yahoo has intended to offload the technology. Yahoo originally acquired Zimbra back in September 2007 for $350 million, but it is doubtful that it will be able to sell the technology for anything close to that figure in this economy.

Assuming the acquisition news is true, why would VMware, a virtualization company, want to purchase a collaboration suite like Zimbra?

Perhaps the acquisition is yet another way for VMware to climb up the stack from its virtualization foundation. In a surprising move last August, the company purchased the open source Java framework specialist SpringSource for $362 million. The big announcement came during VMworld 2009, but met with little excitement from the virtual administrator audience in attendance.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz, a former top executive with Microsoft for many years, has been moving the company from being a virtualization platform provider to a cloud technology player. Where the SpringSource acquisition gives VMware the foundation and the open source talent to move vSphere into the clouds, Zimbra could add to the company’s ability to compete at the cloud application level.

While other companies like Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat enter the virtualization market and fight VMware for market share, VMware continues to position itself as more of a cloud operating system than a virtualization platform player. This strategic positioning works to the company’s advantage as it continues to climb the stack in a virtualization- and cloud-friendly manner. Acquisitions like SpringSource, Hyperic, and now possibly Zimbra fill a big void in VMware’s overall software stack puzzle and allows it to compete at the application level with closed cloud offerings from competitors while retaining an open source approach.

As the cloud wars begin to materialize, consumers and hosting service providers will look to the infrastructure vendors like VMware for answers to help sort out application offerings. Zimbra may prove to be a good fit and a good first step for VMware as it begins to turn course for new waters.

This story, “VMware cloud ambitions could lead to Zimbra acquisition,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.