We are excited to announce today that Yahoo! is acquiring Zimbra to extend its email leadership to the University, Business and ISP markets. In order to focus on this effort, the Zimbra team will report to the communications group where we will remain fully committed to the community and to our customers and partners while leveraging opportunities to enhance their current experience.
We will continue to make our software available for download and continue to offer Zimbra software and support as usual. This evolution further allows Zimbra to exceed its current (and future) customer expectations by leveraging the world class Yahoo! email experience and expertise. Partnering continues to be a very important pillar of Yahoo!’s strategy and this combination will have a renewed focus on partnerships across the globe including our 350+ VAR and hosting partners. The combination of the two companies will only enhance the level of commitment and support to our hosting partners who will remain a key focus for us moving forward.
Yahoo! is also a major proponent of open technologies and this combination is a further testament to how serious they are about their intentions. You will continue to see active participation in developer APIs and forums. We are committed to continue keeping the source open available for use and we will continue to offer the network version that will contain value added proprietary features on top of the open product.
At the heart of this merger is the conviction that email is a core application and Yahoo! can continue to expand its leadership to new markets using Zimbra. For Zimbra, it was the opportunity to grow our footprint at an accelerated pace and the opportunity to provide innovative and new ways to use Yahoo!’s vast SDKs, trusted brand, vast network of users, great communication applications, core email technology like anti-spam and search as well as its ad network to bring in innovative combined solutions to markets that are still left untapped. At every step of the way, we will ensure that Customers have the freedom of choice in what they deploy.
The Zimbra vision has always been that there is a need for an innovative collaboration application for the markets that large corporations have ignored traditionally. We had a vision where the browser was the center of everything a consumer or an office worker needed to accomplish. We were the first to offer a fully offline version of our AJAX application. Together, Yahoo! and Zimbra will continue to deliver on this vision of bringing the richest most collaborative applications to your work place, to your school and to your homes. This is what we will set to do in the coming years.
The combination of these two companies allows us to further enhance our commitment to our markets, our customers, our partners and our community and extend our respective leadership positions. Thank you for all of your support so far and we’re thrilled at the possibilities ahead as we merge these two world-class teams to deliver the best possible experience for our users.
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