Yahoo! purchases Zimbra

20th September 2007

Web portal Yahoo! has announced the purchase of Zimbra, a company that provides web-based email to businesses.

The deal is worth £175 million in cash and stocks and will see Yahoo! add to its already formidable customer base of 250 million email users.

It is already the biggest email provider on the internet, according to a comScore study, with ten times as many clients as rival Google.

Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang remarked that Zimbra's "tremendous talent and innovative technology will help to extend our core mail offerings, further strengthening our strong leadership position in this space".

As well as businesses, Zimbra counts universities and ISPs among its customers, according to IT Pro.

And market analyst Jordan Rohan told the New York Times that the move is a sign that Yahoo! is looking to move from being a web portal to being a provider of third-party services itself.