Everybody Wants You ... Office Applications

Yahoo announced yesterday it is acquiring Zimbra for $350 million, some industry observers think Zoho may be next. We have seen an uptick in the drive toward integrated collaboration applications among the big players either organically or through acquisitions. Zimbra supports MS Exchange and Apple Mail clients and servers. They also have mail support for Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Google Gmail already has many of the features that make Zimbra interesting for Yahoo. For example, Gmail can enable users to retrieve package tracking data; all using AJAX popups and rich-client UI's sans postbacks. Many Web 2.0 features already present in Google, for example Maps, have just appeared in Yahoo platforms. Even Apple is gearing up iWork 2008 for the enterprise, I have seen an increase in Apple within the enterprise lately. IBM announced today they will offer free open-source programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations based on Symphony and OpenOffice.org.  All of these applications are geared toward sharing and collaboration. Using standards such as XML, and direct-drive publishing to social networking sites using web services provides formidable competition to Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft notes (no pun intended for Lotus Notes!) they have 500 million users of Office worldwide. Last count, Zimbra had about 6 million paid mailboxes. There is still a big market and most users have more than one email client in use. Microsoft has not been successful in establishing Office Open XML as a standard with the International Organization for Standards (Geneva). IBM, Google and Sun support the OpenDocument format based also on XML and has been approved as an international standard. Use of AJAX and even VOIP is nothing new here but Zimbra has done a good job briefing key analysts and showing how their applications are used in a corporate setting. They have a good customer base and group of loyal users, especially in higher education. Their offline tools and mashups are particularly useful in a corporate environment for distributed teams. Yahoo in most people's minds is still focused on the consumer and this makes sense for home and personal use.

The financial backing of Yahoo should help Zimbra drive further into commercial environments. Most enterprises have their own well-established email, contacts and calendaring infrastructure. Now IT has to contend with business users demanding richer collaboration tools with better web user interfaces and performance. Interoperability among email platforms is becoming more essential to widespread adoption of newer web-based, client-side enhanced applications such as Zimbra. Document conversion is not completely error prone either which forces some level of standardization among major enterprises.