If you're a student at Georgia Tech or an employee at Digg or Mozilla.org, you know just how excellent your email and group calendaring experience is. That's because it's powered by Zimbra, creator of an innovative Ajax-based mail client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, search and VoIP into an incredibly cool browser-based interface. So cool that we've just entered an agreement to acquire Zimbra for $350 million.

Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us. We're constantly being approached by these entities for our expertise in email and communications. Combining the best of Zimbra with what's made Yahoo! Mail the top dog in web mail will not only allow us to cater to these markets better than anyone, it will allow us to expand our presence to partners and consumers at school, work, and home.

Zimbra, named after a nonsensical Talking Heads song, made its debut at the 2005 Web 2.0 conference, leaving TechCrunch's Michael Arrington saying: "Zimbra is so damn cool and full of Ajax awesomeness..." Here's what Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj had to say about Zimbra's raison d'etre in their October 2005 launch press release:

"… e-mail is broken… From overflowing inboxes to the nuisance of organizing correspondence, to the cost of managing storage, viruses, availability, retention and legal discovery and compliance, dealing with corporate e-mail has become a nightmare. Zimbra's server and application innovations solve these problems for both end-users and administrators."

Zimbra offers incredible technology. We see great opportunities to incorporate some of their best-of-breed features (I really like their calendaring) into Yahoo!'s industry-leading communications products.

If you've never experienced Zimbra, be sure to check out the demo. You'll really notice the wow-factor when you hover over content in email messages and get pop-up previews. The phrase "tomorrow at 10:00 AM" will display any appointments you have at that time, "701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale CA" will launch a Yahoo! Map, a tracking number gives you package delivery status, a phone number lets you make a VoIP call, a flight number provides status details, and so on. Some of these are mash-ups called Zimlets, which developers can create on Zimbra's open platform.

Zimbra’s technology, talent and extensive global customer and partner network have received amazing industry recognition, and we’re excited to welcome the entire team, including Satish, Ross Dargahi and Roland Schemers (also co-founders) as well as President and CTO Scott Dietzen, aboard at Yahoo!.

Brad Garlinghouse
Senior Vice President
Communications & Communities