* What messages the Zimbra acquisition sends
Last week’s acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo is the latest in a string of significant messaging-related acquisitions that have taken place over the past couple of years. While I had expected that Google was the more likely suitor for Zimbra, based in part on the strength of Zimbra’s technology and Google’s current major push into the workplace, the Yahoo acquisition is not much of a surprise.
Although the $350 million acquisition is not yet finalized, plans are for Zimbra to remain as a stand-alone business unit. Zimbra’s offering will retain the same feature set it currently has, and both hosted and on-premise offerings will continue to be offered. As of this writing, there is no planned integration of Zimbra’s and Yahoo’s e-mail offerings, although it would seem inevitable that some level of integration will occur.
I think there are several messages that this acquisition sends:
* First, the hosted messaging market is alive and well. A growing variety of vendors are offering, or will soon be offering, hosted messaging services that offer very feature-rich capabilities. Hosted offerings provide a variety of benefits, particularly for smaller organizations that might not have dedicated IT staff or that are geographically distributed. While many organizations are dead-set against even considering hosted messaging, there are a variety of reasons that they should do so.
* Second, alternatives to the offerings of the major messaging vendors must support standards and be completely compatible with the leading servers and clients. Zimbra, for example, is compatible with Outlook and supports IMAP, iCal and other standards. Having just an ‘Outlook-like’ interface, for example, just won’t cut it for a lot of potential customers.
* Third, the end user messaging experience needs to be compelling. Zimbra’s AJAX-based client that offers integration of Web services and mash-ups of various capabilities provide users with a great deal of functionality.
To address the key issues surrounding hosted messaging, and to address some of the key objections we hear frequently, Osterman Research will be hosting a Webinar on Oct. 3, sponsored by USA.NET. You can sign up for this no-charge event here.
