Now, here’s some complex corporate maneuvering for you. VMware announced today that it is gobbling up Mozy, the six-year-old Seattle online backup service previously owned by storage giant EMC. The deal gets a little interesting in terms of the lineage of these companies. As you may recall, EMC spun off VMware into a publicly traded company in 2007, and it remains majority owned by EMC.

Mozy has its headquarters in Seattle, which also happens to be the hometown of VMware CEO and former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz. In fact, Maritz’ previous startup — Pi Corp. — was acquired by EMC in 2008. EMC later combined Pi Corp. with Mozy to form a new entity by the name of Decho. (The Decho brand name was later dropped).

Confused?

Well, it appears that the deal is simply a transfer from one corporate entity to another.

It’s unclear exactly what the deal means for Mozy employees, but we have an email into the company to find out.

In a blog post, Mozy COO Charlotte Yarkoni (formerly of Xeround) notes that it is a “virtual moving day” at Mozy. And she suggests little will change under VMware.

“While our offices and focus remain the same, Mozy employees are transferring as an intact team to VMware from our mutual parent company, EMC.  VMware and the Mozy team will continue the full portfolio of Mozy services.  In addition, staff from both companies will begin to integrate longer-term development plans central to building and delivering hybrid cloud solutions.  EMC retains the Mozy business as it has been delivering it for over four years now.  An operational support agreement between EMC and VMware is in place to make this possible and ensure no impact to Mozy customers.  We’ve developed a strong partnership with VMware and over these past several months it has become increasingly clear that moving to VMware will allow us to take advantage of and extend the synergies we’ve been building between the companies.   VMware and Mozy share a vision for how cloud computing will transform IT and help businesses achieve greater agility.  By joining forces, we believe we can accelerate the development of offerings that businesses are looking for.”

VMware CTO Stephen Harrod also said that they are committed to supporting Mozy customers going forward without interruption. He wrote:

“Over the past 5 years, Mozy has built one of the best examples of a globally distributed, large-scale cloud offering. We believe that, by being directly engaged with the delivery of such a service, VMware will further ramp our own cloud-related learning and accelerate new IP, scale, and capabilities into the products that we provide to our customers and public cloud partners.”

Derrick Harris at GigaOm has more details on the deal.

Follow up: Mozy executive Russ Stockdale on VMware deal: ‘I’d classify it as a transfer of talent.’

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