Zimbra is one of these companies that started not too long ago, is very innovative and has achieved a steady market position with customers that are confident in the service Zimbra offers. And they should. In fact, Zimbra offers a service that is good enough for Yahoo to acquire, and Yahoo just did that. Zimbra operates in the same field as Google Docs&Spreadsheets and Zoho.

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.()

The deal is confirmed by Zimbra in this press release. It is exciting news, as this clearly shows that :

• Web 2.0 is a serious matter and produces really good stuff
• Yahoo is pretty innovative (we knew that)
• Zimbra has done a very good job

All in all, this feeds our enthousiasm, and means there is hope for all developers of software, especially Web 2.0 software (Saas).