Launches slew of portable, external hard drive products.

Once EMC seems to exemplify the tag line of Godzilla(the movie): “Size does matter”. Today it seems to have also embraced  economist  E.F. Schumacher's  mantra ,“Small is beautiful”. Will the split personality work? EMC-Iomega is saying, ‘Yes, we can’!
July 26, 2009: Just 13 months ago, enterprise infrastructure solutions giant EMC acquired small storage provider Iomega. And last week the company leveraged the acquisition to foray into the Indian consumer market for portable external hard disk options for home and small office.
The first Iomega products  unveiled, included the eGo range palm sized, USB-powered portable hard drives, up to 500 gigabytes; and the ScreenPlay Pro multimedia drives ( 500 GB, 1 TB) , angled at home users who need to store and retrieve movies and other content downloaded from TV.
Available soon across 46 cities in India and backed by an arrangement with Accel Frontline for nationwide support and maintenance cover, will be a full line Iomega offering that includes network assisted storage solutions for small offices and terabyte-hungry homes in the range 1 TB to 6 TB, explained Rajeev Mukul, Vice President for the Iomega Division Sales in Asia Pacific and Japan.
EMC’s motivation lies in the projection made by a recent IDC study it sponsored, entitled “Digital Universe” which suggests a five-fold growth in the world’s storage needs from 486 exabytes in 2008 to just over 2500 exabytes in 2012. The number of actual storage devices was seen as growing from 5000 million to 17,000 million in the same period. One Exabyte is 1000 petabytes or 1,000,000 terabytes. 

Alok Ohrie, Bangalore-based President of EMC India and SAARC, points to the emerging reality that 70 percent of the world’s storage is created by lay people, not corporations. This explains why a company hitherto known for massive enterprise solutions – in 2006, EMC created the world’s largest storage array: 1 petabyte or 1024 terabytes -- has now jumped into the kindergarten end of the storage pool.
And how will it compete with established players in this sector who have an established brand name in the sub-terabyte business? ( Names like Seagate and Western Digital spring to our mind).

Canny software seems to be the key to Iomega’s integrated solutions, where sheer storage space is only facet of the offering: Equally important, says Mukul, are add-ons include McAfee Net security, RSA encryption software, EMC’s Backup and Lifeline storage management tools, as well as online back up options from brands like Mozy. Also on offer will be non-storage devices like TV Link, which function like a remote and help users transfer content directly from TV to storage disk( any storage, not just Iomega).

Link to Iomega product data: http://go.iomega.com/en/?partner=4750

--Anand Parthasarathy in Bangalore