Mozy sells for $76 million to EMC
Mozy, the online backup service I blogged about recently just sold to EMC for $76 million. That’s a 50x return for the investors. Wow…
First of all congrats to Drew Major, who I used to work with at Novell, Wasatch, and the other investors because this is a truly amazing exit given they only raised $1.5 million. Clearly my experience with the service wasn’t consistent with the majority of people out there or I just have too big of a dataset for online backup.
It’s an interesting move on EMC’s part given they purchased Retrospect back in 2004 for around 50 million. This brings their spend on SMB/consumer backup solutions to over $100 million in the last few years. Will EMC be able to grow revenue in the downstream markets (opposed to the hardcore enterprise storage and software space)? Mozy should act as a good feeder for upstream EMC sales on the business side.
Selfishly, I hope this means Mozy will have more resources and engineering horsepower to address the issues with the service that prevent me from trusting it completely.
Status update of my Mozy usage:
- Still using it
- Re-Installed it twice
- Have had the local database of backed up files get corrupted two or three times
- Get frequent connection errors during an backup
- Get poor upload speeds that don’t seem to be due to my network
So the bottom line is that despite the problems I don’t feel like trying another service just yet, and eventually I am able to get my entire dataset uploaded (took about a week of wrangling). At $5/month to back up 45 GB of data, it’s a pretty good deal so I guess my pain threshold is high.
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