Most entrepreneurs are lucky to sell one start-up. A chosen few manage to repeat the feat, building and selling two or more businesses. The folks at Zimbra have outdone them all, selling the same company…twice.

As Kara Swisher of All Things Digital reports, VMware is expected to soon announce the acquisition of open-source messaging company Zimbra from Yahoo. My own sources at VMware confirm the deal.

While Swisher’s report gets the Zimbra ownership change correct, its indication of a distressed asset sale misses the mark.

It’s true that Yahoo has never known what to do with Zimbra, leading it to shop the Zimbra business to various potential buyers, including Red Hat and Cisco Systems. But this is a reflection of Yahoo figuring out that it doesn’t have a future in the enterprise, a place that Zimbra is increasingly calling home, after early success with Internet service providers such as Comcast.

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