MSPAlliance recently had the opportunity to ask Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte, some questions about their file sharing technology, the role of managed service providers in their channel strategy, and how companies can leverage this technology in their managed service practice.
Describe what Egnyte does?
Egnyte provides an enterprise file sharing solution that enables IT to control over where files are stored -- leveraging local storage or choice the cloud provider. Mobile devices and consumer file sharing solutions are driving a need for companies to find a secure and auditable file sharing solution for employees. Egnyte provides employees with a global view of the files they have access, regardless of the location of the file, from the device of choice.
How is Egnyte different from other file sharing and synchronization services?
Egnyte is different than cloud-only file sharing solutions because of the ability to leverage local storage or third-party cloud providers – or any combination. Leveraging local storage provides a significantly improved user experience compared to cloud-only file sharing solutions because of LAN speed file access, avoids over saturation of Internet connection, and does not change user mapped drive behavior. Egnyte also simplifies file sharing for IT by leveraging existing folder structures and access permissions to those folders as well as providing granular audit reporting.
Many MSPs (and their customers) do not like to be told where they can store their files and data. How does Egnyte approach this issue?
That’s the great thing about Egnyte as we offer complete flexibility of where files are stored and shared from. Most customers want files as close to the user as possible, whether that user is in the office or remote. There will also be files that can never leave the firewall. Users need a global view of these files regardless of whether the files are on a file server, on local storage, or on their computer.
What types of customers typically find Egnyte technology beneficial?
We have 30,000 paid customers and almost a million users. These customers are of all sizes and from every industry you can name. You would think that the ability to leverage local storage in conjunction with cloud would be something that only large customers use, but we see usage in companies of all sizes and in nearly half of our customers. Companies that use extremely large files, like advertising, construction, engineering, and manufacturing, are the largest industries where we see traction as well as highly regulated industries such as Healthcare and Financial.
