The Zimbra suite is in use at more than 150,000 organizations, with a total of more than 55 million mailboxes. It can be installed on customer premises or accessed via the cloud from Zimbra hosting partners. VMware has said that Zimbra will further its "mission of simplifying IT." Zimbra will also beef up VMware's offerings to its vCloud hosting partners, by adding a software-as-a-service (SaaS) component to its existing IT infrastructure and application-development-platform hosted services, according to VMware.

Matthew Day, IT manager at in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, has renewed the company's Zimbra contract from year to year since the Yahoo acquisition out of uncertainty for the suite's future.

Now, after learning of VMware's intention of buying Zimbra, Day feels relieved. If the VMware acquisition closes successfully, Day will not hesitate to renew his company's Zimbra contract for a longer three-year period for its about 400 end-users.

"There were a number of ways the road could have gone for Zimbra and the team and I feel the VMware road is a good one to be traveling down," he said via e-mail.

Zimbra customers like Day like what they perceive as an aligned focus between it and VMware.