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Figuring out what's become of Pi Corp.(Seattle Times, The Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 17--Details are finally emerging about what's become of Pi Corp., the mysterious startup that former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz started in Pioneer Square. Pi was launched in 2003 and sold in February to EMC, the Hopkinton, Mass.-based data-storage giant. Maritz became head of EMC's cloud-computing efforts, and then in July was named chief executive of its VMWare virtualization-software subsidiary. Meanwhile, the fate of Pi was largely unknown. But today the company is announcing that it's being renamed Decho -- short for "digital echo" -- and merged with Mozy, a Pleasant Grove, Utah-based online backup and storage service that EMC acquired in 2007. The Mozy service will continue to operate with its current brand name. It's now storing about 10 petabytes of data for customers, including consumers paying $4.95 per month for unlimited storage and businesses paying $3.95 plus 50 cents per gigabyte. Decho, the parent company, will have its headquarters at Pi's offices in Pioneer Square. It has about 100 employees, including 20 in Seattle and others in Utah and Bangalore, India. Maritz is on the Decho board, along with other EMC executives, and occasionally uses the Pi offices. But he's running VMWare from Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Fitzgerald, a former Microsoft platform strategist who joined Decho as vice president of product management at the start of the year. Decho is close to hiring a chief executive who will be based in Seattle, Fitzgerald said. Pi continues developing personal-information-management technology that will likely be added to Mozy next year, Fitzgerald said. Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or [email protected] To see more of The Seattle Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.seattletimes.com. Copyright (c) 2008, Seattle Times Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |