VMware takes over Mozy backup service

IDG News Service - VMware has added another cloud service to its lineup, hiring Mozy's workers and acquiring its assets.

Mozy is an online data backup service that serves businesses and consumers. Since EMC owns Mozy and is majority owner of VMware, the deal involves related organizations. But the companies say the change will help VMware boost its cloud offerings.

"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," Steve Herrod, CTO for VMware, wrote in a blog post about the deal.

He praised Mozy's back-end systems, saying the company has built a scalable, fail-safe way of building out secure, automated data centers. He said he's excited about "some of the core data-handling technologies developed by the Mozy team."

VMware hopes that in offering the Mozy service it will gain more access to small and medium-size business customers. The majority of VMware's new customers over the past year came from the SMB community, Herrod wrote. "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," he wrote.

The companies appear focused on the business services from Mozy. "VMware and Mozy share a vision for how cloud computing will transform IT and help businesses achieve greater agility. By joining forces, we believe we can accelerate the development of offerings that businesses are looking for," Charlotte Yarkoni, Mozy's chief operating officer, wrote in a blog post.

VMware plans to handle the operation of the Mozy service without causing any interruptions to it, Herrod said.

The company has made at least one other move toward offering cloud services to customers. It is working with Salesforce.com to build a cloud service that will host Java applications.

Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com