Mozy.com Expands Its Scope

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EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, MA, seems to be setting great store in its Mozy acquisition as an integral part of its strategic thrust into the consumer marketplace.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci admits to SMB and consumer ambitions. He sees the companies Lifeline, Iomega and Mozy product lines as being key to that strategy.

“The individual consumer is generating 85 percent of all information and that information has to live centrally,” said Tucci. “We want to go from A to Z in storage.”

What he means is that EMC will provide the central repositories for vast stores of data, and everything else all the way down to the consumer and small business. At the vanguard of this downwards thrust is Mozy, which represents EMC’s first foray into the SaaS world.

This emphasis has the folks at Mozy more than happy with the EMC stewardship.

“Mozy has a customers ranging from General Electric to the home office, but the fastest growing segment is SMB,” said Vance Checketts, chief operating officer of Mozy. “But it’s interesting to note that GE made Mozy the standard for backing up laptops and desktops.”

Prior to becoming part of EMC, Mozy was content to acquire a big account or so each year. Now that the company has access to the vast resource network of EMC, far more is expected. As a result, its product line has been expanded with the release of Mozy Enterprise.

What you have now is a version for the home, the SMB and the enterprise. MozyHome is the consumer/SOHO version. You can actually use up to 2 GB of online backup free, or pay $4.95 a month per laptop or desktop.

“MozyHome provides unlimited amounts of backup from that one device,” said Checketts. “Next comes MozyPro which might take you as high as about 250 users or so.”

This one is priced at $3.95 per month per user with an additional fee of 50 cents per gig. Alternatively, it can be licensed for a central server at $6.95 per month plus 50 cents per GB.

The big change, though, is at the top end. MozyEnterprise, said Checketts, requires a little more tech savvy – at least someone around who is looking after desktop support. It is priced at 5.25 per month per desktop and 70 cents per month per GB protected. On the server side, it costs $9.25 per month per supported Windows server plus $2.35 a month per gigabyte protected.

“MozyEnterprise automates secure online backup and recovery over the Internet for consistent and reliable off-site data protection for remote desktops, laptops and branch office servers,” said Checketts.

The back end is built upon EMC Fortress, which is a secure platform for SaaS delivery. It also has the benefit of security features imported from EMC’s RSA Security Division. Checketts reports that Mozy is seeing growth in all segments. While consumer has traditionally been the area of most rapid growth, it is currently being outdone by SMB expansion.

“We still have the highest growth in customer numbers in the consumer space, but the percentage growth rate in SMB is now higher,” he said. “I believe that the enterprise market has the potential to show similar growth.”

While Mozy has always been a Windows stronghold, it recently expanded its base by announcing MozyHome for Mac.

“We are also bringing out MozyPro for Mac this summer as we are seeing a lot of demand from Mac users in such fields as education and graphic design,” said Checketts.

Further, the company is expanding globally. According to Checketts, 25 percent of its users are now outside of the USA. As a result, the company is setting up a data center in Dublin, Ireland to deal with overseas users and foreign language users.

As for the EMC deal, Checketts thinks it has worked out very well. He says it has brought stability, expansion, better data center capabilities and brand recognition.

“SMBs might have been reluctant to trust their data to an unknown startup,” he said. “But many small business owners know EMC and that tells them Mozy will be there for the long haul and can be counted on to keep their data safe.”

He reports that EMC has also helped to company to forge partnerships that wouldn’t have been possible before and has significantly bolstered its back-end infrastructure. By having easy access to EMC hardware, software and data centers, it can now deal with a lot more data. EMC Fortress is just one example.

This article was first published on EnterpriseITPlanet.com.