Egnyte hopes to ignite its file storage and sync business with a whopping $29.5 million in new funding. With its earlier rounds considered, the company has raised nearly $60 million – that’s quite a war chest.
But not all of this cash will be socked away. The company plans to triple the number of workers doing R&D in Europe, and start new offices in Chicago, Florida and New York. “This new funding will help fuel our global expansion plans, which include a move to our new 30,000 square-foot U.S. headquarters, as well as the opening of a U.K. office early next year,” said Egnyte CEO and Founder Vineet Jain.
Egnyte’s market, file sharing and sync, is a hot area as more and more users are more and more mobile and use more and more devices. And instead of loading all the PC and mobile devices with client software and having the file sync and share engine on an in-house server, it is far easier to plunk it all in the cloud. This is true for small shops, and just as true for enterprises who must meet the demands of hundreds or thousands of increasing mobile and multi-device end-users.
The problem is consumer services don’t have the security, access control, and other features enterprises demand. The result is these services can be a major source of data leakage – and most of the time IT doesn’t even know that they are in use.
Egnyte has a different approach. “Egnyte is an enterprise-based file sharing service which gives corporations the option to share files online, sync and store while keeping data secure. Administrators have control over user access on the platform, and any highly-sensitive files can either be kept on the premises or stored in the cloud for additional security,” the company said. This approach has helped Egnyte gather up more than 40,000 customers.
The Egnyte Approach
While the cloud is mostly where it’s at for file share and sync, Egnyte offers a hybrid approach where enterprises can indeed use their own on-premises storage to house files if they want. Meanwhile the Egnyte tool is integrated with third party wares such as DocuSign and Google Drive.
The company is reporting that its revenue through partners has been growing quarter-to-quarter on a triple digit basis. Unfortunately, as is often the case with private companies, no actual financials were revealed.
The file sync and share space is now big enough that Forrester Research follows it as a category, as it did in its recent “Forrester Wave: File Sync and Share Platforms, Q3 2013” report. While Egnyte may indeed be on the move, it was Box that came out on top as a ‘leader’, followed by fellow leaders IBM and EMC. Topping the strong performer rankings were Accellion, Citrix, Egnyte and WatchDox.
What did Forrester have to say about Egnyte? “Egnyte differs from its “born in the cloud” competition in its ability to run a hybrid architecture, where files can be stored on-premises or in the cloud (or split across multiple locations) and the metadata access can run someplace else. This ability to split the hosting environment gives firms the flexibility to keep content under lock and key while extending the sync and share services out to mobile devices efficiently over wireless networks,” the research house said.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
