Yahoo acquires Zimbra for $350 million

It appears that TechCrunch has it on very solid grounds that Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source office suite Zimbra. The price of $350 million, all of it in cash, is confirmed.

Excerpt from TechCrunch:

The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers.

This is hot on the heels of its recently launched offline functionality and rumors of a potential offline Gmail client in the works.

It seems that the race for the next generation of e-mail and office productivity suites, both online and offline capable, is on.

Which player do you reckon will come out ahead here?