VMware cloud ambitions could lead to Zimbra acquisition

Yahoo is rumored to be selling off its open source collaboration software, Zimbra, to virtualization giant VMware

Yahoo could be on the verge of selling off its Zimbra unit to virtualization software giant VMware, according to a report coming out of All Things Digital, a tech division of The Wall Street Journal.

So far, both parties are still denying the rumored acquisition.

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So what is Zimbra? It's an open source, Web 2.0 collaboration and messaging software system for enterprises and service providers. You can think of it as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, and the software is already available as a VMware virtual appliance.

Rumors have been circulating for a while now that Yahoo has intended to offload the technology. Yahoo originally acquired Zimbra back in September 2007 for $350 million, but it is doubtful that it will be able to sell the technology for anything close to that figure in this economy.

Assuming the acquisition news is true, why would VMware, a virtualization company, want to purchase a collaboration suite like Zimbra?

Perhaps the acquisition is yet another way for VMware to climb up the stack from its virtualization foundation. In a surprising move last August, the company purchased the open source Java framework specialist SpringSource for $362 million. The big announcement came during VMworld 2009, but met with little excitement from the virtual administrator audience in attendance.