Enterprise social software provider Telligent today announced that it has acquired Zimbra, a messaging and collaboration solution. Telligent acquired Zimbra’s assets from VMware, who bought Zimbra from Yahoo in January 2010.
– Patrick Brandt, CEO, Telligent.
Telligent is acquiring the assets of Zimbra, including product IP, existing customer and partner relationships and the core team. On completion of the acquisition, Telligent and Zimbra will merge to form Zimbra, a new software company offering a unified social collaboration suite.
The new company will combine Zimbra’s messaging and collaboration solutions with Telligent’s social community, collaboration and analytics software, thus enabling customers to maximize productivity, innovation and customer experience.
The combined company will have offices in Dallas, Palo Alto, Tokyo, London and Pune, India. It will be led by an integrated management team under the leadership of Patrick Brandt, Chief executive officer, Telligent.
Under the new Zimbra brand, Zimbra software will continue to be made available on premise and in the cloud through the company and its partners.
Zimbra will continue to receive investments from VMware along with other investors, and VMware will be a strategic partner of the new Zimbra, helping to ensure long-term continuity for customers and partners.
The acquisition is not expected to impact the next major release of Zimbra (JudasPriest), scheduled for early next year.
“This acquisition is a reflection of how people collaborate in today’s post-PC era,” said Patrick Brandt, Chief executive officer, Telligent.
“Zimbra enables traditional collaboration through features such as email, calendar sharing and address books, while Telligent supports real-time collaboration via chat, social networking, online communities and more. The combination of the two will enable companies to easily share documents and ideas instantly, providing true unified collaboration,” he added.
“As we focus on the software-defined data center, hybrid cloud and end-user computing opportunities ahead, it was important for us to find a great fit for Zimbra’s people, customers and partners, and we found it with Telligent,” said Carl Eschenbach, president and chief operating officer, VMware.
“Given its focus and complementary technology, Telligent is ideally suited to enable continued growth for Zimbra. We are confident that we will provide a smooth transition for customers and partners and that they will be in good hands with seamless product support, further technology innovation and additional go-to-market investments. We also look forward to a strategic partnership with the new Zimbra to help ensure long-term continuity for our customers and partners.”
Patrick Brandt has written a blog on Telligent’s acquisition of Zimbra from VMware.
For more information, please refer to the For more information, please refer to the Zimbra blog and the VMware blog.
