Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed. Our coverage of Zimbra goes back to 2005. They gained wide exposure at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Recently they launched offline functionality .
The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers. This was a very, very smart acquisition. In one quick move Yahoo is now in the race with Google for the next generation online/offline office suite. I would not be surprised to see them pick up Zoho next. That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs. Update: Here is the Yahoo press release and Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj’s blog post on the acquisition. And here’s the Yahoo official blog post .
