September 19, 2007

Yahoo Offers Business Class Email. What This and More Means To You.

Yahoo is the leader in providing free email to consumers. For business, Yahoo has also offered a good mix of solutions including web hosting, ecommerc, online marketing and email.

With the purchase of email and shared calendar company Zimbra Yahoo can offer more services to its customers and better compete with Google and Microsoft in offering business class services.

Email is a VERY critical part of business communications, while Yahoo's current email offerings were good for small businesses, Zimbra offers a more robust feature set.

Zimbra offers a hosted version, through partners, or a version for download and hosting on a companies own servers.

What does this mean for you?

You will find that your options for IT services are circling back to brand name service providers. Have you ever heard of Zimbra before? Doubtful. Have you heard of Yahoo? Sure.

What about Postini? Doubtful? Google - sure. Google recently bought email security company Postini (of course if you were reading Smallbiztechnology.com you would know that already).

So you'll see more and more of the services offered by smaller companies being offered by larger companies with household name brands.

Here's some other companies, with great services that I would not be surprised if they were acquired:

Gotvmail - telecommunications
Constant Contact - email marketing
BlueTie - hosted email

Who might acquire or work more closely with these companies?

Google
Microsoft
Intuit
Dell
Yahoo

Keep your eyes open - the vendor you buy from today could be a different vendor tomorrow.

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