Zimbra, the open source email hosting solution acquired by VMware earlier this year, is making its debut as part of the VMware family. It now has a virtual appliance offering designed for data center and hosting purposes.

Combining vSphere with Zimbra, the result is a centralized portal for accessing the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance.

This is all part of the new VMware stack for the cloud, making good on VMware’s intention for integrating the email hosting service. In VMware’s efforts to bulk up its platform offerings, the company is now better able to compete in a crowding cloud market.

Looking at some of VMware’s other initiatives in the past twelve months, it’s clear that the company has a long-term roadmap around growing its client base and redefining various aspects of the public and private cloud. An earlier partnership wit SalesForce added to this a la cart approach, and the new collaboration suite through Zimbra presents even more options for someone deliberating over their own use of the cloud.

The growing product list from VMware also speaks to the requests and demands of current consumers, addressing their security and usability concerns on varying levels. This strategy not only seeks to gain new users, but keep existing users with a fresh array of services to choose from.

This strategy is important for VMware, as it builds-up its stack to better compete with Google, and more recently, Microsoft. Both Google and Microsoft have been pushing personal and enterprise cloud services, combined with their consumer products that solve very specific needs. Moving forward, VMware will also be looking to bump out others in its direct competitor market, an area that’s becoming fragmented through the adoption of different verticals and audiences.

In all, products such as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance also look to catalyze the uptake for these types of services, developing an economy around enterprise and individualized virtualization.