Woowar

This year, they've done a similar thing, with this announcement popping into my inbox just now:

Today, we have announced our intent to acquire the email messaging assets, supporting staff, and customers of Outblaze Ltd., a privately-held provider of online messaging and collaboration services.

Based in Hong Kong, Outblaze has 10 years of experience in delivering online services and was one of the first companies to offer fully-hosted, multilingual email services. Today, Outblaze operates one of the world's largest online platforms that provides private-labeled email, collaboration, and social media services for enterprise clients, service providers and academia.

The Web-mail assets of Outblaze will be combined with Project "Bluehouse," IBM's social networking and online collaboration service. These assets will also be incorporated into our Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging solution, which will give customers a broad choice of online messaging solutions and our Partners great opportunities.

We may hear mention of this in the OGS on Monday, methinks.

Interestingly, this only mentions acquiring the "email messaging assets" and integrating the "web-mail assets" of Outblaze. From what I can tell, Outblaze does a whole load more than just webmail: calendaring, file/document sharing, social networking (forums, blogs, picture/video albums, tagging, search): I wonder what will become of those? Certainly, those features tread on the toes of the existing Bluehouse beta feature-set. Mind you, Bluehouse treads on the toes of SameTime Unyte, Quickr and Connections already anyway, so perhaps the picture is going to get even more confused before it gets clearer ...?