EMC's announcement of Decho is a good start of what I was trying to articulate here; I hope this is the beginning of services which will allow us all to manage our Digital Lives more easily. I had a suspicion that we were going to see something along these lines and I am expecting more especially in light of the Atmos announcements last week; I'm working on another blog post about Atmos and some thoughts on that. It's just Mozy today but hopefully we're going to see more than just online back-up services.
I wonder what level of integration we are going to see with other online services; for example, wouldn't it be cool when we purchase something from iTunes for it not only to be downloaded to our home-system but for it to move to our digital vault as well? When we take a picture, perhaps with an Eye-Fi enabled card for it to get automagically uploaded to our digital vault? Is it only me or are not the possbilities for this sort of service fantastic? That's the digital Echo…
And the digital bounce; well, I want to be able to bounce between formats depending on the device I'm accessing the data from. So that the presentation of the asset becomes transparent to me.
Also, I think we are witnessing something very interesting with EMC and the direction it is taking. The ambition in moving beyond it's traditional boundaries/markets and what it acquires next….eyes too big for its belly? We'll see.
p.s 'Zilla, I didn't answer your little teaser because someone had already hinted. But I'm enjoiyng your little teaser campaigns, you're wasted…….in your job! A role in marketing surely beckons!
HP have a similar idea; http://www.SnapFish.com. It’s less generic than the EMC offering, being photos only. EMC are on backup now, PIM later, then who knows what path.
More to the point, both HP and EMC seem to see the individual as the target, with perhaps EMC making a nod towards small business too.
What’s in this for the enterprise boys? You’re in that space, Martin, what do you see as the positives of such a service to your organisation?
Any idea what legal would say about storing company data “offshore” as it were? That’s one area I would imagine causing concern.
The only thing in it for us at present is a potential re-sell of the service. We already do re-sell a SaaS to our broadband customers.
I think the biggest blocker to wide-scale adoption is the network bottle-neck!
As for storing company data off-shore; you have to be very careful. Put it like this; in my previous role, we had a centralised IT function serving 168 different countries with conflicting legislation.
Sadly right now my feeling is this area in EMC is suffering from a couple of things :-
a) Internal in-fighting and cannibalisation issues – ie corporate policitcs and junk
b) Marketing & aspirations overcoming delivery and execution…
Trust me I’d love it to be in a better place right now (as I believe this area has a great potential) but my experience is they have too much baggage, too much greed and too little resource to deliver on the promises within timeline and features…