Berkeley Data Systems Inc., a firm founded two years ago by Silicon Valley emigre Joshua Coates, said Monday that GE had acquired its MozyPro backup system for PCs used by 300,000 GE employees worldwide.
Terms were not disclosed, but Berkeley Data spokesman Devin Knighton did not find fault with an Associated Press account that placed the contract's value at $10 million annually.
Calls to GE for confirmation were not returned.
Berkeley Data has made a splash since it was formed in 2005 to develop backup programs for PCs. The programs copy files and send them over the Internet to remote servers, which can send the information back if the PCs crash or some other accident occurs.
A year into its existence, Berkeley Data launched Mozy to help consumers protect documents, photos and videos on their PCs. Coates said more than 170,000 consumers now use Mozy software.
"We actually spent nearly zero on marketing," he said. "Our strategy was to build the best product in the world and, on the consumer side, to give it away for free. . . . On the Web, things spread like wildfire. It didn't take long for us to become the leader in the market."
Berkeley Data then released MozyPro earlier this year. The business-oriented counterpart to Mozy, it has been snapped up by 3,000 customer companies - with more in the offing, Coates said. But none are as large as GE.
"We're very pleased with how the market has received our technology," said Coates, noting his workforce has tripled in size the past four months and now has 25 full-time employees and a half-dozen part-timers.
Coates, 33, grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and studied large-scale parallel computer systems at the University of California at Berkeley. After working in a research laboratory, he operated his own computer storage company from 1999 to 2003.
"I'm kind of a Silicon Valley veteran," said Coates, who sold the company's intellectual property rights to Intel and then moved to Utah, where his wife had family. "I wanted to decompress and get out of Silicon Valley. It's beautiful [here] in the mountains. It's a low-stress environment. I wanted to take time out and figure out what comes next for me and my family."
Doing research on his own led to Berkeley Data.
"All businesses need remote backup. If you have a local backup and your office burns down or is robbed or flooded, your business is in big trouble. Most businesses that lose data from servers go out of business in a couple of years," he said. "Our system's data is encrypted. You're protected no matter where it goes, over the Internet or halfway around the world. There's no safer way to keep your data protected."
Coates' plan made sense to Novell co-founder Drew Major and venture capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, of Menlo Park, Calif., and Wasatch Venture Fund, of Salt Lake City. They provided the startup cash.
"We've known Josh Coates for quite some time, and he's obviously an acclaimed technologist, a top leader in storage space," said Nick Efstratis, managing director of Wasatch Venture Fund and a Berkeley Data board member. "Josh is a guy who has built large storage systems in the past, in different locations and for different companies, and we knew he could build it if we funded him. He's done it."
The need was there, added Efstratis.
"This was a market that was not meeting its potential," he said, contending that existing systems were using antiquated technology. "But when Josh came to us a little over 1 1/2 years ago, his model was based on technology that was truly unique . . . that offered a much better user interface and user experience."
News of Berkeley Data's contract thrilled Utah Technology Council President Richard Nelson.
"This is fantastic news," he said, "but not at all surprising with the genius of Josh Coates and his team."
mikeg@sltrib.com
