If you don’t already know Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite owned by Yahoo, and goes toe-to-toe with SaaS PIM’s offered by Google for example.
The platform didn’t get much traction compared to the competitors above and Yahoo is rumoured to be trying to sell it since September 2008.
The tech division of the The Wall Street Journal, is reporting that VMware is acquiring Zimbra.
While this is seems extremely unlikely, WSJ is a very reliable news source.
So, assuming this rumour will be confirmed as true, the question is: why a virtualisation vendor like VMware would want a SaaS collaboration suite like Zimbra?
The new CEO Paul Maritz, which has been a top executive in Microsoft for many years, may envision a new VMware which offers IaaS, PaaS (see the SpringSource acquisition) and SaaS technologies all together.
Again, assuming this acquisition is confirmed (a big question mark), it is legit to ask: is the company moving this way because this is the right way to evolve for VMware, or just because this is the best way it could survive a future where Microsoft turned virtualisation into a real OS commodity and Google persuaded the world to embrace HTML5 and just release web applications?
Interesting times….