EMC, the software and data-storage giant based in Hopkinton, MA, is announcing today it has formed a new company called Decho. The new organization is composed of two formerly separate EMC businesses—American Fork, UT-based Mozy and Seattle-based Pi. The merged operation will focus on cloud computing services having to do with managing people’s digital information, including the online backup and storage of personal data.
Xconomy is very familiar with EMC (NYSE: [[ticker:EMC]]) and Mozy. Back in October 2007, we wrote about the story behind EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems, which developed Mozy, the online backup service. The Mozy desktop application automatically uploads copies of key files and folders to Mozy’s servers, and is best known for its popularity among consumers rather than companies.
As for Pi, the software startup was acquired by EMC last February, and has always been pretty stealthy about what it’s doing. (Its name stands for “personal information,” not the transcendental number we know from geometry class.) The firm was originally founded by ex-Microsoft exec Paul Maritz, who became CEO of VMware (also part of EMC) in July. Maritz will remain at VMware, and is on the board of Decho. The new company has more than 100 employees based in four cities: Seattle; American Fork, Utah; Montreal, Canada; and Bangalore, India.
Charles Fitzgerald, Decho’s vice president of product management (also an ex-Microsoftie), sat down with Xconomy last week to tell us more about the direction of the company. First of all, its name stands for “digital echo,” referring to the data bouncing around between a user’s devices—phone, laptop, desktop—and the Internet cloud. “If you look at the new Decho entity, we are a cloud-based service provider focused on personal information. We’re beyond the startup stage,” says Fitzgerald. “We have eight figures of revenue now and are growing nicely…The revenue is all coming from Mozy.”
Why focus on personal information management? Fitzgerald cited four catalysts: the sheer volume of data out there (70 percent is from individuals—things like photos and documents); redundant information scattered across many devices; the desire of customers to save data for decades; and the need to categorize and tag our information in an automated way. “Today’s world is very device-centric,” Fitzgerald says. “Instead of a device-centric world. we’d like to have an information-centric world where the core information is something I can act on and protect and manage and enrich very explicitly.”
To that end, Decho will be combining Mozy’s technology—cheap disk storage with advanced software algorithms—with Pi’s
