By Simon Quicke3 September 2008
The number of vendors offering hosted solutions has been
bolstered by the addition of EMC which has started from today to offer its
Mozy online backup for SMEs using Lenovo as its hardware partner.
The service is being offered to Lenovo customers for a 90
day trial and then annual costs of $60 a year. The service is backed up by the
opening of a international data centre for Mozy located in Ireland.
EMC’s online package offers encrypted backup that is
available as the Lenovo Online Data Backup service in the UK from today.
The Mozy service has been running in the US since last year with the company recently reporting it had doubled the numbers of business users that were subscribing to the service to 20,000.
Vance Checketts, Chief Operating Officer of EMC’s Mozy
business unit, said that it had turned to the Chinese PC vendor to get its user
numbers ticking over: “The Lenovo
partnership accelerates our plans to expand the Mozy service worldwide, and we
look forward to offering international customer support and localised language
versions.”
One source said that the customer interest and concern
around data back-up and restore remained a constant feature of the industry.
“I have been in the market for ten years and backed then it
topped the list of customer concerns and it continues to do so,” he said.
He added that it indicated there was a continued need for
education and marketing to assist resellers promoting solutions that solved
that problem.
