The web office suite maker Zimbra has entered into a purchase agreement with Yahoo. The search and services giant will acquire Zimbra for $350 million.
Zimbra's killer app is its integrated e-mail client, contact manager and group calendar web application. It's primarily designed for use within organizations, so start-ups, schools and small companies have been rapid adopters. In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Yahoo's Brad Garlinghouse notes that employees at Digg, students at Georgia Tech folks at Mozilla.org (funny, thought they'd be using Thunderbird) all use Zimbra internally for communications and calendaring. UPDATE: Apparently, Mozilla does use Thunderbird on the desktop, but the employees use Zimbra primarily as a server. The web app gets use "from time to time." (Thanks, John!)
Zimbra is one of the few strong independent players in online web apps for the office. This acquisition in particular is a big move for Yahoo, which is now obviously positioning itself to challenge Google in the web-based enterprise office applications space.
Google's docs, spreadsheets, mail and chat applications already have a strong following, but web apps that run in the browser continue to play second fiddle to office software that runs on the desktop. However, the game is quickly changing. A recently issued memo from Microsoft shows the software giant is finally starting to seriously worry about losing its dominant position on the office desktop to web-based alternatives. Good timing, Yahoo.
