We here at Mozy are excited to announce a new partnership with Vodafone! Vodafone is the world’s largest international mobile telecom company, with mobile networks in over 70 countries (including a 45% stake in US telecom giant Verizon Wireless), more than 300 million customers, and over $60 billion in annual revenues. They will be introducing a range of business and consumer personal cloud services that are built on Decho’s Mozy online backup service. They’ll initially launch with a PC backup and data management service that will allow customers to protect, access, organize, and share their data. This service will be launched across a number of Vodafone’s European markets throughout the rest of the year.

This partnership, along with our partnerships with China Telecom and McAfee, highlight the emergence of “the personal cloud,” a phrase coined by Frank Gillett of Forrester (subscription required) to mean the movement of individuals’ personal data into the cloud, where they’ll be able to monitor, safeguard, and use their data anytime, anywhere. It’s an exciting revolution in the way we interact with our information, and we’re thrilled to be at the forefront.

Just another quick graphic to show how our digital lives are becoming more and more integrated with the cloud through email, streaming video and music, mobile devices like phones and netbooks, and services like Mozy that help people put their data in the cloud where it can be accessed from virtually anywhere.

In the past several years, Internet usage in China has absolutely exploded, and now there are more than 330 million Chinese Internet users who, like everyone else, have data that needs to be protected and secured.

That’s why we here at Decho/Mozy are excited to announce our partnership with China Telecom, the largest telecommunications and broadband provider in China! With China Telecom’s 214 million fixed lines, 47 million broadband subscribers, and 35 million mobile users, we’ll be able to help millions of Chinese Internet users protect and manage their data in the cloud!

We’re calling the new service eYun (which is Chinese for eCloud). It’s powered by Mozy and already has 15,000 pilot users,. We’ll initially be providing safe, secure online backup services, but in the future, eYun will let users do even more with their data with additional cloud services.

You can find out more about the Mozy/China Telecom partnership in our press release.