Science
Written by Alma Anonas-Carpio / Correspondent
Tuesday, 13 January 2009 19:43

EMC Corp. recently established a new company, Decho Corp., focused on helping people protect, manage and enrich the ever-growing quantity of personal digital information in their lives or “digital echo.”

Decho will be a combination of two formerly separate EMC businesses—Mozy Inc. and Pi Corp. Decho will continue to offer consumers and businesses Mozy-branded online backup service, as well as introduce new cloud-based services for individuals over time.

The personal information once stored in albums, boxes and filing cabinets—including financial records, personal documents, family photos and videos, portfolios of professional work and correspondence—makes up each person’s digital echo. Such files are commonly uploaded into home and remote-access office networks, stored online through social- networking web sites or on the databases of individuals’ financial, telephone and utility service providers, among others.

The quantity of personal digital information produced every year around the world is now measured in the hundreds of billions of gigabytes and is expected to continue to grow annually by almost 60 percent, analysts predicted.

Decho seeks to help individuals take full control of their digital echo through a set of cloud-based services that will enable easy and full utilization, organization and enrichment of important personal information.

“There is an immense, untapped business opportunity as personal information management inevitably migrates into the cloud,” EMC executive vice president and chief financial officer David Goulden said. “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.”

Decho’s initial service offering is the Mozy online backup service, an online backup service that may be used by both individual consumers and businesses. With over 900,000 users and over 25,000 business customers, Mozy safeguards over 10 petabytes (over 10 million gigabytes) of customer information at its datacenters around the world.

Decho is wholly owned by EMC, which acquired Mozy Inc. in October 2007 and Pi Corp. in February 2008. The new company will maintain and grow its development and operations centers in Bangalore, Montreal, Seattle and Utah. Decho will be headquartered in Seattle.

* Published by BusinessMirror