File sharing company Egnyte has had a busy last couple of months – make that weeks. First the company nabbed close to $30 million in fresh venture capital, meaning it has gathered some $60 million overall.
Fresh on that momentum, Egnyte bagged a major partnership with NAS provider Synology.
The file sharing/NAS combo will be aimed at mid-size companies. The pair is even demoing the integration at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Why is this important? The value of MSPs is most often realized through partnerships. Partners benefit from a broader offering, while customers gain value with a single source of support for multiple integrated tools.
“The integration will provide businesses with a single solution that enables secure local, off-line and cloud access to files from anywhere and through any device. Users can create and collaborate on files and then securely sync those files with Egnyte through the cloud to a Synology DiskStation NAS,” the pair said. “Growing businesses can deploy Egnyte on multiple Synology DiskStations across numerous offices, enabling the ability to connect them together under one central access point. This helps employees, and Egnyte also eliminates the need to set up and maintain new infrastructure to provide secure file sharing beyond the firewall.”
Synology is looking forward to selling services that run on top of its NAS.
“We’re thrilled to be working with Egnyte for this integration as it provides our customers with an enterprise-grade file-sharing application through our Package Center, combined with the strength of our award-winning storage solutions,” said Jason Bonoan, product marketing manager at Synology America Corp. “The ability to share files through the cloud with the combination of Egnyte and our Synology DiskStation NAS allows better network bandwidth and enables options for our customers to easily and securely share their business files both inside and outside of the office.”
Money in the Bank
As we mentioned, Egnyte just got a fresh round of cash, a sweet $29 million.
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.
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
