EMC forms Decho subsidiary, targets consumers' 'digital echo'

Fresh off the debut of EMC's enterprise cloud storage platform, the vendor has formed a new company known as Decho to help consumers manage personal information in the Internet cloud.

Decho, or "digital echo," combines Mozy and Pi Corp., two online storage vendors that EMC has purchased since 2007.

Decho gives EMC a two-pronged approach toward the emerging concept of cloud storage. The recently unveiled Atmos software helps enterprises pool and manage massive amounts of storage distributed around the world, essentially letting them build their own private "clouds" in a computing model similar to the ones employed by Google and Amazon.

Decho tackles cloud storage from the other side, giving consumers a Web-based destination to manage their own personal data, such as videos, photos, financial records, Outlook files and various other documents. (Compare storage products.)  

"There is an immense, untapped business opportunity as personal information management inevitably migrates into the cloud," EMC CFO David Goulden says in a press release. "By bringing Mozy and Pi together to form Decho as a new subsidiary, we are creating a focused organization that can deliver on the promise of cloud-based personal information management and can help individuals everywhere preserve, manage and enrich the information most important to them."

EMC in September 2007 bought online backup provider Mozy, whose service provided near continuous data backup of a user's files every two hours, and let them recover lost data from Mozy's servers. EMC followed that move in February by purchasing Pi, which made software and online services to enable users to control how they find, access, share and protect files including photos, videos and music. That data could be stored locally or over the Internet.

Decho is a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC and has development centers in Bangalore, Montreal, Seattle and Utah, a blog posting on Decho's Web site says.

The Mozy online backup service is considered Decho's flagship product, and offers both home and small business versions. EMC did not say exactly how Pi and Mozy technology will be integrated but said Decho will introduce new cloud-based services to consumers in the future.