Zimbra sale a sign Yahoo finally understands itself
Has Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra failed? All Things Digital reports that Zimbra, an open-source collaboration server company acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $350 million, is being actively shopped around to potential buyers. If so, it's a failure of Yahoo to go enterprise, and not a failure of Zimbra's technology.
Zimbra was always a bit of a stretch for consumer-focused Yahoo. Zimbra, after all, has always been about the enterprise. While the company flirted with building out its enterprise focus, that distraction become unbearable with Microsoft's advances and its own crumbling fortunes.
Despite Yahoo's poor stewardship of the Zimbra business, it's impressive that Zimbra continues to grow. From my own conversations with various Zimbra executives, sales continue to be brisk and community enthusiasm goes from strength to strength.
Given these facts, Zimbra could be a jewel in the crown of a variety of companies, including Google and Comcast, as All Things Digital suggests, but also IBM, to invigorate its Lotus technology; Adobe, to provide additional SKUs to sell to its broad, SMB customer base; Oracle, to give it a compelling alternative to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange; or a variety of others.
Former Zimbra investor and board member Peter Fenton once told me that he regretted selling Zimbra, as he felt like it had tremendous potential that was only beginning to be realized. Yahoo, with its focus on consumers, was never the right home for Zimbra to realize that potential.
Selling Zimbra may give the open-source collaboration and messaging leader an even stronger position from which to expand.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
It is also a technology issue, trust me. We at Open-Xchange have been there and done that.
I understand your deep relationship with Zimbra leaves you feeling the need to defend them, however, if Yahoo had been able to easily integrate Zimbra technology into its consumer and SMB offerings (as was originally the idea behind the acquisition) it could have been a windfall for the company. Imagine offering shared calendars, address books, document sharing to families and SMBs all for pennies per user a month. Actually, no need to imagine it, as many of the world?s top hosting companies ARE offering those capabilities right now.
Since we spent the past three years on re-writing Open-Xchange from ground up to make it work in such shared hosting environments, we know what it means to the underlying technology. You can not simply take an on-premises enterprise app and make it work for millions in a SaaS environment. That was why ASP failed. It's all about integration into existing mail and provisioning infrastructures, high-end scaling, millions of tennants, fail-over and session migration and much more. See it at work at 1and1.com and networksolutions.com, this is what Yahoo wanted but didn't get.
All the best
Rafael