EMC has never been shy about straying from its core business of enterprise and network storage. It jumped into virtualization via the purchase of VMware and moved into document management when it took over Documentum. The results have been good. In its most recent reported quarter software license and maintenance revenue increased 25% year-over-year and accounted for 41% of revenue. Now EMC is hopping to leverag EMC has never been shy about straying from its core business of enterprise and network storage. It jumped into virtualization via the purchase of VMware and moved into document management when it took over Documentum. The results have been good. In its most recent reported quarter software license and maintenance revenue increased 25% year-over-year and accounted for 41% of revenue.Now EMC is hopping to leverage last fall’s $76 million purchase of Berkeley Data Systems into a seat at the SaaS table. As of Tuesday, EMC is offering an online backup and recovery service based on Berkeley’s Mozy technology. EMC is already managing 5 petabytes of Mozy storage at two centers in Utah, for more than 500,000 devices. Most Mozy customers are smaller businesses and even consumers, with the notable exception of GE, which uses the services to back up data from thousands of notebooks, desktops and remote servers. Since Mozy customers pay by the byte via a monthly subscription, and since the data is housed remotely in a multi-tenant infrastructure, EMC is now playing the role of service provider. Indeed, the company has just created a new business unit to handle its SaaS business, and MozyEnterprise, as the new service is called, is the unit’s first product. EMC’s SaaS roadmap is not altogether clear, at least for public consumption, but in an interview shortly before the news was announced, Roy Sanford, VP of marketing for the new unit, gave some pretty broad hints. Customers, he said, have asked for SaaS-enabled offerings in security, compliance, content management and email. Expect to see more offerings from the new unit later this year, he said. The Mozy offering itself doesn’t strike me as all that exciting, and I doubt that it will have much of an impact on the company’s top and bottom lines, at least in the short run. But the fact that EMC is moving into SaaS speaks volumes about the rapid pace of change in the software business and EMC’s determination to find new areas for growth. Why is EMC moving towards SaaS? Customers have asked for it, says Sanford, and the technology, which wasn’t robust enough to support the old ASP model, is now ready for primetime. It expands EMC’s addressable market into the SMB and consumer spaces, and will provide a relatively predictable revenue stream. It will be interesting to see how EMC deals with consumers, a pesky and sometimes expensive customer set, and to see if events bear out Sanford’s contention that MozyEnterprise won’t cannibalize existing EMC sales. It won’t, he says, because Mozy did not and will not include data center backup, a big part of EMC core business. (Disclosure: I have a small position in EMC.)I welcome your comments, tips and suggestions. Reach me at bill_snyder@infoworld.com Technology Industry