EMC Corporation is announcing the creation of a new subsidiary this morning called Decho (for Your Digital Echo), which has been formed from the assets of two acquisitions: Mozy (acquired in September 2007) and PI Corporation (acquired in February 2008).
The new company is focused on protecting and managing personal digital data. It will continue to offer Mozy’s personal backup product and will add new products over time. The Mozy platform, which now stores over 10 petabytes of user data, has over a million users, 200,000 of which are paying customers. We were particularly impressed with its Mac product, first launched in mid-2007.
There isn’t much information on what new applications the company will launch. But if PI Corp. is anything to go on, look for rich metadata and contextual information to be a part of it. PI Corp. was acquired before launching their flagship storage/backup product. But their website suggests they are far more focused on managing, organizing and searching files than simply backing them up – something Mozy never tackled. The combination of the two platforms is more than interesting.
Wow this is very interesting indeed. Pi has some of the brightest engineers working in cloud computing too…
Peter Epstein
http://www.thewebwar.com
I’ve been a happy Mozy customer for over a year, and they saved me from two hard drive crashes; one on my home PC and one on a MacBook hard drive that went bust. For $9.90/month, I consider it a bargain.
My only complaint was the reinstall of my Mac information — it didn’t make it one-click easy to restore the files on the drive. I ended up having to talk with the Mac Genius Bar.
But, it’s much better than having to remember to back up with a physical unit, and I love that it’s redundantly backed up offsite!
Interesting. I haven’t heard anything from Mozy or any of the other backup companies for some time and was wondering if they had survived this economic mess.
Ironically, I was just reading about a new http://backthefup.net site from Mozy in the Guardian UK and stumbled upon your post as well. Looks like they’ve been busy.
Any idea who will be leading the new division? Paul Maritz would have been the most likely candidate before leaving for VMware.
It certainly seems like a great start for the new company. Although, I still feel like there’s an online storage company everywhere you turn. Accessibility will be key for all players and I would like to see even more consolidation happen.
Yes, there is a new online storage company everywhere you turn but, EMC is not just a company with a jbod in their mother’s basement. Working for EMC they have the best storage arrays in the business. The uptime, security and speed is worth it alone.
EMC is one of the big players in the new “on-premises cloud” war. EMC, VMWare, Intel, NEC etc are all trying to get to BIG enterprises with the new clod computing. Microsoft is also looking to tap the big enterprise market. Check this out: http://www.azur...loud-computing/ ” … second half next year, Microsoft will announce their own Windows Azure on Premises solution”.
This is interesting but there is a company called PutPlace that does all of that already.