EMC Buys BDS, Operator Of Mozy, An Online Backup Service

In late April 2007, Profy published its first piece on Mozy, an online storage service which had then debuted a Mac-compatible version of its software. A relatively minor announcement, in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless, it was the company’s first mention here. Later, in mid-August, I wrote up a piece about the current state of online storage, in which I gave Mozy another plug, though in that particular instance I didn’t give it such a stellar ovation. It was grouped in with a series of present-day online storage solutions, all of which appeared (and still do, I might add) as less-than-ideal backup utilities when compared to localized offerings.

Well, regardless of how I personally portray online storage services at the moment, they look today as very attractive alternatives for a good number of people. Mozy in particular has been marketing itself with such an attractive face that its parent company, Berkeley Data Systems, has effectively stolen the heart – or at least a quite a few million dollars – of a much larger storage industry player (EMC), and will now live out its future under a much grander roof.

EMC, one of the largest information management companies (because calling it “storage” is so beneath their standards) in the biz, is reported to have doled out a quaint $76 million for BDS, whose Mozy backup service is said to maintain a relatively sizable 180,000 usership. If that figure is indeed accurate, the purchase of BDS pegs every Mozy user as worth at a whopping $422.

BDS’s original proprietors, a supply of venture capitalists that since April have ponied up some $1.9 million to keep things at Mozy moving smoothly, will effectively make out very well on their investment when all checks clear.

Does this move by EMC tell us anything important? Well, not much other than the fact that the company is clearly looking ahead several years down the line, at which point a previous investment in a sterling Web-based backup service will be seen as very smart, strategically speaking. It’s clear that there will eventually come a time when there is overwhelming demand for such solutions, both in the business and consumer worlds.

I haven’t any doubt that we’ll eventually see a great migration from local information management solutions to ones out in “the cloud”. When that happens, EMC will be happy to have spent what it did when the getting was still very, very good.