EMC Munches Mozy

After weeks of speculation, EMC has finally swallowed Berkeley Data Systems , the parent company of online backup specialist Mozy, as EMC fleshes out its software-as-a-service (SAAS) strategy.

The deal is worth around $76 million, according to Mozy CEO Josh Coates, who will now become a CTO within EMC's Advanced Technology Group. "Mostly I am going to be doing R&D work and a more supportive role for Mozy moving forward," he says.

The exec, who will report to EMC CTO Jeff Nick, tells Byte and Switch that all of Mozy's 60-strong workforce will be moving over to EMC. "We will be a wholly own subsidiary of EMC, managed by the New Ventures Group."

EMC confirmed this morning that Mozy will not have a material impact on its revenues or earnings per share for 2007, although it has not revealed its specific plans for the company.

The Mozy deal is 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.Backup has already been highlighted by EMC as a key part of its future strategy. Back in April, CEO Joe Tucci outlined this plan at SNW, when he listed SAAS as as a key focal point for upcoming EMC announcements, hinting that online backup would be at the heart of this effort.

Other vendors are already latching onto the SAAS trend, including disaster recovery specialist SunGard, which unveiled a managed email archiving solution earlier this week, and Seagate, which recently took the wraps off its EVault Unified Recovery service. Yosemite Technologies, which this week overhauled its own FileKeeper backup offering, has also revealed plans to enter the SAAS market sometime in the first half of next year.

In addition to Iron Mountain, which already has a number of SAAS offerings, EMC rival Symantec is also working on its own SAAS solution, Symantec Protection Network Online Backup Service, which will be available later this year.

Mozy has a rapidly growing storage infrastructure supporting its SAAS offerings, according to Coates. "Early this year, we were at a Pbyte, but now we're over three Pbytes," he says. "There's no end in sight, as demand [from users] continues to increase."

The exec is slightly less forthcoming on technology specifics. "We can't talk a lot about the details of the technology -- we have been asked by EMC to stop talking about that," he says, although he confirms that Mozy uses some form of proprietary clustering technology. "We're not using traditional SAN or NAS."In a letter to customers today, Coates urged users not to worry about future support from EMC. "EMC will continue to invest in Mozy's full portfolio of online backup and recovery services and advance the Mozy brand in the marketplace," he wrote, adding that Mozy will keep its headquarters in American Fork, Utah.

In a set of Q&As on the Mozy Website, the startup also promises that customers' data will remain secure in the aftermath of the acquisition, explaining that "data security, management, and storage" will stay the same. Users' existing backup accounts and folders will not be affected by the deal, and customers will not need new passwords.

Mozy's flagship products are MozyPro, which is aimed at businesses, and the consumer-focused MozyHome for Windows and 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.

Touted as an alternative to local backup like 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 vendor began offering MozyPro in December 2006 and claimed around 2,500 customers by the time it officially launched the product in April this year.

Mozy's customer list is now around 8,000, and EMC is getting its paws on some big-name clients like General Electric, which is using the solution to provide remote backup services to its 300,000 employees.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.