EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci on Feb. 6 told a standing-room-only press conference at the RSA Security Conference 2007 that the storage vendor is currently researching and apparently will pursue an online archiving (called vaulting) service strategy in 2007.

Other vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Comcast, AT&T, CommVault and a number of VARs and MSPs, such as AmeriVault, are in the online vaulting business already. If EMC, the 800-pound gorilla of storage, heads into online vaulting, it would be similar to Microsoft moving into basically any IT market.

Click here to read about EMC's comfortable lead in the worldwide storage software market.

But there's plenty of room in the market, said Scott Bush, director of marketing at Waltham based AmeriVault, which is an EMC partner.

Click here to view exclusive channel research from Amazon Consulting.

"We're not concerned [by the potential new competition]," Bush said. "Iron Mountain did the same thing with LiveVault. There is so much room for growth because the backup market today is still 95 percent tape-based. So that means the online backup world is probably 5 percent. A lot more room for growth for everyone in this space.

"We have seen adoption of disk to disk in past five years. A lot of that has been in-house. But as data becomes considered more critical, compliance, desire for multiple copies, we think this will be more of a managed solution."

"It further validates what we've been saying for over eight years," he said. "There is a strong place for managed service outsourcing data back up so companies do not have to rely on highly paid it people to do that daily mundane task. This becomes an outsourced solution, much like you would do with payroll. We become the custodians of data protection. We are just specialists in data protection."

Tucci said he disagrees with online outsourcing of storage at the enterprise level, but said a "backup copy of your data archived offsite or online with a trusted partner or service."