“metadata” platform. “Pi provides some very sophisticated metadata management—finding, tagging, and indexing stuff and having a more semantic understanding of the data in these clouds,” says Fitzgerald. “We have a bunch of data centers like other people, but the magic is at the software layer…Mozy will continue to be the brand for online backup going forward, but you will see us also provide some additional applications to take advantage of that back end.”
Fitzgerald isn’t saying much about what those applications will be just yet. “You can think of multiple propositions,” he says. “We certainly will go back to somebody who has done backup and say, ‘Hey, would you like to do more with your backup? You have a critical mass of data in the cloud, and there are other things you can do with it.'” Fitzgerald adds that the main challenges going forward are on the business side rather than technical, and they include “getting customers comfortable with the platform.”
So, will Decho be primarily a consumer brand, and how will EMC run it? Fitzgerald hinted that the new venture will be a fairly autonomous entity. “We are a cloud service provider who sells all the way up to GE—but part of the reason for making it a new company is that it is a very different space from the traditional EMC space,” he says. “Catering to consumers among other customers is very different from anything EMC has done traditionally. In recent years, they’ve been pretty good at making things more or less loosely coupled depending on what they need to do from a business perspective. VMware and RSA are more or less autonomous.”
We’ll have to wait and see what new products Decho has in store for its users, and what its impact will be on EMC’s business. But all signs point to it being a formidable competitor in the race to cash in on people’s need to organize their stockpiles of personal data online.
