When Yahoo acquired Zimbra, it was a big deal. Two years and $350 million later, they’re parting ways. Datamation takes a look at what happened, and how the two grew apart.
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After spending $350 million and two years of effort, Yahoo officially announced yesterday that it was selling its open source Zimbra e-mail collaboration unit to VMware.
So why the change of heart?
In conversation with InternetNews.com, top executives from Zimbra commented on their time at Yahoo and why a parting became necessary. While having an e-mail collaboration vendor made sense for Yahoo two years ago, today’s Yahoo just isn’t the same company — and it doesn’t have the same goals.
“Clearly, as the macroeconomy changed and as the Yahoo situation changed from the Microsoft stuff all the way to CEO changes, they looked at their focus and they want to be a consumer starting point,” Zimbra General Manager Jim Morrisroe told InternetNews.com, referring both to Yahoo’s deal to outsource its search engine to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and its changes at the top that in early 2009 saw former Autodesk exec Carol Bartz appointed to the CEO post, replacing Yahoo founder Jerry Yang.
“Our enterprise software market and momentum with big cloud providers wasn’t necessarily a fit as much as it was,” Morrisroe said. “They did everything we needed to help us grow our business and help us satisfy customers, but it just wasn’t a fit.”