Saturday, January 09, 2010

Collaborative Thinking: VMware-Zimbra acquisition rumor perplexes users

Timely insights from Gartner/Burton Group’s Mike Gotta.  I continue to believe it will go a big step further – with Cisco acquiring EMC and VMware (of which EMC is 86% owner)

Interesting rumor - but I agree with Chris Wolf and would add one possible scenario: Cisco, EMC, and VMware formed the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) to help organizations with their private cloud implementation (per this Cisco release: Accelerate the Journey to Private Cloud Computing). I would expect that VMware would tailor Zimbra to work with Cisco's emerging collaboration platform and efforts to leverage WebEx and SaaS-based e-mail.

This line-of-thought is just one possible scenario that might rationalize the deal if VCE actually does bring Cisco, EMC and VMware closer together. Such coalition cooperation might result in other independent actions taken my coalition vendors to acquire and partner in seemingly random ways that synergize VCE overall.

Collaborative Thinking: VMware-Zimbra acquisition rumor perplexes users

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