Audio: EMC CTO Jeff Nick on the Company's Tech Priorities

EMC's chief technology officer, Jeff Nick, was on the opening panel at the XSITE 2009 conference at Boston University this morning. We sat down for a few minutes to chat about the tech themes currently on his radar screen (virtualization and the "private cloud" among them), and also what's up with EMC's consumer division, Decho (which includes Pi Corp. and Mozy.)

The 13-minute long MP3 is here, or you can just click play below.

Consumer-Oriented Online Storage: Mozy vs. Carbonite

Sunday's Globe column looked at how Carbonite and Mozy are building the market for consumer-oriented online backup services. Carbonite is a Boston-startup funded first by CommonAngels; Mozy is a Utah start-up acquired by EMC in 2007.

From the piece:

Mozy and Carbonite are two of the leaders of the online backup business, a rare bright spot in a gloomy tech economy. Rather than buying their own hard drives to save a copy of their data, consumers and small businesses pay a fee (Mozy's is $59 a year, Carbonite's is $50) to send their information securely over the Net, and have Mozy or Carbonite keep a copy that can be retrieved any time. IDC, a Framingham research firm, predicts that online backup services will generate about $715 million in annual revenue by 2011.

The big question is whether a start-up like Carbonite, with 125 employees and $47 million in venture capital, can capture a bigger piece of that market, or whether a division of a big company like EMC will have the edge.

To accompany the piece, there's an audio interview with Carbonite CEO David Friend, who talks about how hard it was to raise VC money for a consumer-oriented company in Boston.

Tom Kennedy, who does some communications consulting for Iron Mountain, pointed out to me that that Boston company also offers online PC backup. I should have included them, even though none of the reviews I could find of consumer back-up services mention their Connected Backup for PC offering. (Perhaps because its pricing is much higher than Carbonite's or Mozy's?)

EMC to Analysts: Stop Bugging Us Already

EMC needed a play in Web-based back-up. If they didn't get into this business, geared to consumers and small companies, Wall Street analysts would never stop bugging them about why they didn't have a play.

So this week, EMC bought Berkeley Data Systems, the Utah company which runs the online back-up service Mozy. EMC didn't disclose the price, but TechCrunch says its sources peg the tag at $76 million.

What's interesting to me is that EMC didn't make a bigger deal of this acquisition: no quote from nominal EMC CEO Joe Tucci in the release...and they didn't seem to offer Tucci up to the Globe, which ran just a brief item or the Wall Street Journal. The NY Times hasn't covered the news at all, so far as I can tell.

Is that really the way to indicate that this is an important new direction for your company?