Zimbra is something of a hot potato. The email and collaboration specialist was acquired by Yahoo! a mere two years after its foundation, and got sold to VMware three years later in January 2010. This week, it exchanged hands once again.

On Monday, enterprise social software provider Telligent announced that it has agreed to buy the firm for an undisclosed amount. The two firms intend to merge under the Zimbra brand in order to “enable customers to maximize productivity, innovation and customer experience.” The combined company is set to receive funding from VMware, Intel’s investment arm, NXT Capital Venture Finance, BDCA and the Hall Financial Group.

“This acquisition is a reflection of how people collaborate in today’s post-PC era,” Patrick Brandt, the chief executive officer of Telligent, wrote in a statement. “Zimbra enables traditional collaboration through features such as email, calendar sharing and address books, while Telligent supports real-time collaboration via chat, social networking, online communities and more. The combination of the two will enable companies to easily share documents and ideas instantly, providing true unified collaboration.” Brandt called the acquisition an opportunity to “return Zimbra to its roots” as an independent firm with a ‘vibrant’ open-source community.

The buyout represents a notable milestone for VMware as well as Zimbra. It underscores the virtualization vendor’s efforts refocus on its core segments, an initiative that started with the shedding of some 500 employees and a sizable portion of its cloud and Big Data assets to Pivotal Labs.

A month after the spin-off, a company called LANDesk Software announced that it has acquired Shavlik, a provider of IT management and endpoint security solutions that VMware picked up in 2011. Terms of that deal weren’t disclosed either.