EMC's Iomega Pushing 'The Personal Cloud'

Jonathan Huberman, who was CEO of the company at that time of the acquisition, remains in control. In an interview with Forbes last week, Huberman laid out his expectations for both this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and provided some thoughts on how the company is navigating through an increasingly concentrated hard disk-drive business.

The small business

Huberman notes that EMC’s current focus in network attached storage for the small business and consumer market. The company also nevertheless makes direct-attached storage units – your basic external hard drives – however notes that the market for DAS has been completely commoditized, dominated by the two remaining giants in the hard-drive market, Seagate and Western Digital.

“We have the best software stack,” he says, thanks to its storage-centric corporate parent EMC. “It’s easy to use. For consumers and small businesses, there is a fear factor here. If it isn’t easy to use, it doesn’t get used.”

The cloud computing trend

Latching onto the cloud computing trend, Huberman is pushing the concept of a personal cloud. His suggestion: set up a pair of NAS drives in two different locations, perhaps one at home and one in the office. At that time back the data from one onto the remote drive. Voila! Personal cloud. Access your data from anyplace, and have it backed up automatically to a remote location. And in the process, he says, you can reduce your reliance on storing personal pictures, video and other content on third-party sites.

Huberman contends that no one ever writes about the downside of cloud storate. “There are pros and cons,” he says. For small businesses, he sees potential cost savings from the personal cloud approach. Example: The company has partnered with a Swedish video surveillance camera company called Axis Innovation to develop a low-cost system for video surveillance. For $1,000, he says, a retailer or other business can have a leading edge surveillance system, and at that time store the video files remotely for regulatory purposes.

The Iomega chief contends that network accessible drives are going to steadily kill off the DAS market. “Nearly everyone who buys research has multiple computing devices, even people who live alone,” he says. “So why not have the ability to share their data on in one price?” And he adds that the price difference between the two technologies is so small – about $40 for a drive as large as 2 terabytes.

“They lose money,” he says. At 10 cents per/gig per month, 1 TB would be $100 a month. “How many consumers are willing to do that if I can sell them a TB for $80?” He as well notes that some small businesses remain leery of putting core assets like clients lists on third party servers – and he notes that even large companies like RSA and Sony have suffered major data loss to hackers in recent months. “Hackers are going where the money is, the big vaults of data.”

Cloud storage on third party sites, he contends, is not a panacea: just in case to the hacker threat, he sees potential legal issues if your hosting site happens to go out of business. If a company’s servers are sold in a bankruptcy sale, he wonders, who owns and will have access to the data?

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Long career at Barron's

After a long career at Barron's, I joined Forbes as San Francisco bureau chief in December 2010. I've been writing about innovation and investing for more than 25 years. With the Tech Trade, I'll pick up where I left off when I was writing the Tech Trader Daily blog at Barrons.com. When I'm not working, you can find me riding my road bike around the Bay Area hills, managing my fantasy baseball team, rooting for my beloved Phillies and Eagles and hanging out in the Valley with my family.