Decho - EMC Takes Over The World

Chris Mellor just announced the news that EMC have bundled their Pi and Mozy acquisitions into a single entity, branded as Decho. I was far too slow and Storagezilla beat me to the mandatory EMC post.

So, with Mozy and Pi we now have our data and backups online in the EMC cloud - which conveniently arrived last week as Atmos.

I may have been somewhat overly negative towards EMC in previous posts (they're big boys, I'm sure they can take it), however the layering of cloud storage offerings with Atmos as the foundation (assuming they eat their own dog food and use it) and content/backup over the top does move EMC into a new and interesting market segment in offering storage services rather than just tin (or software for that matter).

Where's the logical conclusion as to where EMC are headed? Is the move to Storage-as-a-Service an implicit acceptance that, over time, hardware will become even more commoditised and that services are the future? In the long term, surely that's the ideal scenario for the end user; all data and services in "the cloud" somewhere with no need to know where/how the data is stored other than service level and performance guarantees. It's not likely to happen in the near future but as a long term trend, it is certainly compelling.