EMC Makes $76M Mozy Move

EMC is rumored to be buying startup Mozy for $76 million as part of its ongoing attempts to bolster data protection and backup.

Mozy is one of a number of vendors, including Seagate, specializing in online backup, and EMC will add the startup to its string of recent storage acquisitions, according to press reports.

The American Fort, Utah-based firm's flagship products are MozyPro, which is aimed at businesses, and the consumer-focused MozyHome for Mac-based backup. Each MozyPro license costs $3.95 per month, and the startup charges an additional 50 cents per month for each Gbyte of data stored on its Pbyte storage cluster.

Neither Mozy nor EMC would comment on the possible deal when contacted by Byte and Switch earlier today.

EMC is nonetheless keen to overhaul its backup story, as evidenced by recent announcements. The vendor bulked up its backup capabilities at EMCWorld earlier this year, and the firm's CDO Mark Lewis has predicted big changes in the way that the vendor delivers backup.The vendor's CEO Joe Tucci underlined this strategy back at SNW in April, when he listed software-as-a-service (SAAS) as a key focal point for upcoming EMC announcements, hinting that online backup would be at the heart of this effort.

In addition to Seagate's eVault offerings, Iron Mountain is also a major player in this space, and EMC's rival Symantec is also working on its own SAAS offering, Symantec Protection Network Online Backup Service, which will be available later this year.

Touted as an alternative to local backup such as tape, disk, and DVD, Mozy has aimed its online backup products at firms struggling to meet the compliance requirements of regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The 50-employee startup began offering MozyPro in December 2006, and claimed around 2,500 customers by the time it officially launched the product in April this year.

This number is now around the 7,000 mark, and Mozy, which started life as Berkeley Data Systems in 2005, has already racked up some big-name clients. One of these is manufacturing giant General Electric Co. , which is using the solution to provide remote backup services to its 300,000 employees.

The Mozy deal would be the latest in a slew of acquisitions from EMC, including Avamar, Kashya, Network Intelligence, and Tablus. The Avamar and Kashya deals, in particular, aimed to boost EMC's presence in the backup and recovery space."At the rate at which EMC is buying things [the Mozy acquisition] would not surprise me," says John Webster, senior analyst at Illuminata, adding that online backup has already established itself as a viable proposition for SAAS.

At a reported $76 million, Mozy would also fit in with EMC's strategy of buying small storage firms. Earlier this year, Tucci vowed that EMC would not get involved in any more multi-billion acquisitions, such as the $2.1 billion purchase of security specialist RSA. Instead, the exec promised to bring the disparate parts of the EMC product line together.

Online backup would seem a logical place for EMC to layer-on additional security and document management services. Today, for instance, rival Seagate took the wraps off a set of enhancements to its eVault offering, adding plug-ins for Microsoft SharePoint and support for VMware.

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