Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece. That said, I think the above argument works if you're looking at Zimbra purely as an acquisition of technology. My view,

Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece. That said, I think the above argument works if you're looking at Zimbra purely as an acquisition of technology. My view, as might be gathered, is that this - like a lot of enterprise acquisitions - is as much or more about the business that Zimbra was doing. Where business reads as: the account inroads they've made in small hosts and service providers everywhere; the kind of accounts that are crucial to VMware's future. Whether it justifies the valuation is a question of revenues, which we don't have a good sense of, but if this helps advance VMware's larger ambitions it's certainly worth a significant multiple of an early stage startup.