There was an interesting snippet from VMware, as it announced the sale of Zimbra, the email and collaboration company it acquired from Yahoo in 2010. Telligent, which provides social software for internal business use, is the buyer. Financial terms were not revealed.
Telligent is from the new social software school of real time collaboration (e.g. chat, social networking, online communities). Zimbra is a ‘traditional’ collaboration offering, providing calendar sharing and address books along with email functionality. As we said in Is Social Software an enterprise proposition?, these two classes of application need to come together if social collaboration software is prove itself in the internal business collaboration environment. That is exactly what Telligent plans to do via the creation of a “unified social collaboration suite”.