Founder's skills culminate in Mozy Inc.

Josh Coates no longer owns American Fork-based Mozy Inc., thecompany he founded to provide remote data backup over the Internet.But Mozy, which was acquired by EMC Corp. in 2007, continues toprovide simple, secure data backup to 500,000 customers and 20,000corporations.

Each step in Coates' career helped develop skills and ideas thatwould culminate in Mozy. Coates began while still pursuing hisdegree in computer science at the University of California atBerkeley. As a student, Coates and two associates broke the worldrecord in data sorting, beating out competitors from Compaq and IBM.His first post-graduation job was at Inktomi, where he developednetwork caching software.

But the entrepreneurial bent was strong in Coates, and he soonleft to found Scale Eight, which developed scalable storage softwaretechnology. After selling the company's intellectual property toIntel, Coates directed engineering and operations for the nonprofitInternet Archive in San Francisco.

In 2004, Coates moved his family to Highland, and the followingyear, he founded Berkeley Data Systems, which would later becomeMozy. Coates decided to raise the lowest possible amount of venturecapital so that he could maintain control of the business.

In its third year of operations, Mozy began providing backupservice to General Electric's entire global employee base. Since itssale, Mozy is run as a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC, and Coatesserves as chief technology officer of EMC's Advanced DevelopmentProgram.