Today it is my pleasure to announce that VMware has hired the team and acquired assets behind EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service. VMware will operate the Mozy service on behalf of EMC without interruption. However, the strategic relevance of today’s news is what this group brings to VMware. Over the past 5 years, Mozy has built one of the best examples of a globally distributed, large-scale cloud offering. We believe that, by being directly engaged with the delivery of such a service, VMware will further ramp our own cloud-related learning and accelerate new IP, scale, and capabilities into the products that we provide to our customers and public cloud partners.
The scale of the Mozy service is impressive. Let’s talk some numbers… today they have more than 1 million users, 70,000 business customers, and a worldwide network of datacenters storing more than 70 petabytes of data. 70 petabytes! That’s enough to store the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history… in all languages... with 20 petabytes to spare. But it’s about more than simple backup of all of this data. Mozy has taken the base technology that keeps you from losing your data and turned it into a scalable, fail-safe way of building out a collection of highly-automated datacenters with strong security and 24/7 operations fronted by elegant, user interfaces across many client types. This is the foundational architecture for the many cloud-based services being delivered today.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with many of the Mozy team members over the last year. The individuals responsible for building, operating and maintaining this service at a global scale clearly possess the experience and knowledge essential to running such an operation, and we’ll be leveraging that to improve our own products and help customers and partners to best leverage them.
The Mozy team will also help VMware continue to serve the burgeoning SMB community as they move forward on their own path to cloud computing. In the past year, our customer base grew by more than 50,000 customers, the majority of which came from the SMB community (many through our “VMware Go” offering). It’s clear that organizations of this size (with little or no IT staff) are moving even more rapidly to adopt IT services via the public cloud. We’ll make sure that these customers have easy access to the Mozy back-up service as well as other related data services to come.
I’m also excited about some of the core data-handling technologies developed by the Mozy team. The Mozy future roadmap is going to excite consumers and businesses alike, and we also see the opportunity to leverage Mozy’s data compression, synchronization, client integration, and analytic tools to extend several existing and not-yet-announced VMware products.
It truly is an exciting time to be here at VMware and working with such great talent to bring the enterprise hybrid cloud to our customers and partners as they continue the journey to IT-as-a-Service. Also, check out what Mozy’s COO Charlotte Yarkoni had to say about today’s announcement.
