Move over, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Make some room, IBM (NYSE:IBM). Another IT giant wants some space on that silver-lined computing cloud.
Data storage specialist EMC (NYSE:EMC) has glued two small acquisitions together into the foundation of a personal information and data management platform for the cloud generation. Dubbed Decho, shorthand for "Digital Echo," the new entity will sell online data backup plans along with identity management solutions. Over time, I imagine that the company will become a "set it and forget it" destination for ensuring that your personal information stays safe from prying eyes, hard drive crashes, and other disasters.
EMC normally keeps a tight focus on the enterprise sector, so this is a move in a new direction for the company. Decho starts out with 900,000 customers from its components' old customer lists. At $5 per month per paying customer, we're looking at a $54 million annual revenue base, assuming no volume discounts or free trials. That's a drop in EMC's more-than-$14-billion sales bucket -- but virtualization expert VMware (NYSE:VMW) also started out as a smallish investment for EMC, and it has grown into a serious sales force with nice, plump profit margins.
It seems like everybody is jumping onto the cloud computing bandwagon these days. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is turning Azure over this opportunity, while Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) nibbles at Mr. Softy's heels with decidedly cloudy MS Office alternatives and consumer tools.
But while the business world sat up and took notice of this paradigm shift early on, the Joe the Plumbers of the world seem largely unaware of what's going on -- or what new products are available to simplify their computing lives in an increasingly online world.
EMC alone won't change the world, but the company runs at the bleeding edge of a total revolution. Plaudits to the company for grabbing some brand recognition and market share early in the race, because I think that Main Street will catch on soon enough and change the computing world forever. Bye-bye, clumsy desktop systems -- and hello, svelte notebooks connecting to beefy central servers.
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