Market activities this week
There have been two notable events this week in the collaboration software market - firstly the acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo! on Tuesday, followed by Novell's reach into the broader collaboration market through the release of two new products, Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming and Conferencing.
Yahoo's purchase of Zimbra, a small, California-based start-up which provides Web 2.0-based online and offline email and calendaring as well as document and spreadsheet capabilities, is notable as much for its price tag of $350 million as for its impact on the market. Founded in 2003, Zimbra's three rounds of funding amounted to $30.5m, making the company an excellent investment. In this market where there is such an unusual mixture of broad suite vendors and numerous start-ups and small, independent players, this demonstrates a key concern for enterprises - whether they can really afford the risk of best-of-breed tools in a consolidating market.
Novell's announcement is another illustration of the draw of collaboration for vendors; a long-time player in the email and groupware market with GroupWise, Novell is finally building on this experience and client base to deliver team-based collaboration. With core technology gained through an OEM agreement with SiteScape, Novell's solution leverages its heritage in identity management and email/calendaring to provide a solid, competitive first release product. It also puts Novell in an interesting position - while it is a familiar vendor in IT departments within enterprises, Novell will now need to shift its focus to the business, which will mean a different set of partners and a different marketing focus. It will also have to be careful not to over-emphasise the Linux angle with business users - something it is prone to doing. Many vendors find it hard to make the IT-to-business transition; time will tell whether Novell can do it.
Labels: collaboration, Novell, Zimbra
