EMC Merges Mozy, Pi to Form New Storage Company

What’s in a brand name? Confusion, for one thing — if you change the moniker often enough.

EMC on Nov. 17 established a new Seattle-based subsidiary called Decho (short for “Digital Echo”), which will focus its attention on helping people “protect, manage and enrich the ever-growing quantity of personal digital information in their lives.”

Funny, protecting and managing personal information is what I thought EMC and Mozy are supposed to do. They have to go and break out a new company to do this for them?

Decho, not to be confused with Necco candy wafers or the old Decca record label, is a mashup of two current EMC divisions: Mozy, which handles online backup services, and Pi, which was founded by current VMware CEO Paul Moritz. A number of people haven’t been able to figure out what Pi does, to tell the truth. Something about cloud services, we heard.

Why didn’t they just call it Mozy Pi? Do I have to do all the marketing for these guys? Sheesh.

“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,” said David Goulden, EMC’s chief numbers guy — sounding entirely like a numbers guy.

Decho’s first service offering, naturally, is Mozy’s existing online backup service for Windows or Mac OS X laptops, desktops and servers, which is now up to about 900,000 users and 25,000 business customers. Mozy claims to house about 10 petabytes (10 million gigabytes) of customer information at its data centers around the world.

Sigh. We kind of liked the name “Mozy,” which depicted easy-going folks. Decho, sounds so … well, tech-o.