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.
How do MSPs play into your overall channel strategy?
MSPs and Egnyte are like chocolate and peanut butter. Egnyte provides a differentiated service in one of the hottest spaces in IT today. MSPs can rebrand the Egnyte service and add it to their portfolio of service offerings. MSPs can start small with customers and rapidly upsell the rest of the user base. Egnyte offers a two-week free trial to show prospects the value of file sharing. Leveraging a combination of local storage and cloud will enable MSPs to solve significantly more use cases than cloud-only approaches to file sharing.
What types of MSPs are best suited to partner with Egnyte?
Any MSP is focused on delivering services to end-users in their customers. Consumer file sharing services combined with using personal devices is driving many companies to look for secure file sharing solutions where employees can increase productivity by working on mobile devices whenever they have time from wherever they are.
About Vineet Jain
Vineet is the CEO and co-founder of Egnyte. Prior to Egnyte, Vineet founded and successfully built Valdero, a supply chain software solution provider, funded by KPCB, MDV and Trinity Ventures. He has held a rich variety of senior operational positions at companies like KPMG, Bechtel, etc. in the past. He has 20 years of experience in building capital-efficient and nimble organizations. Vineet earned a BS in Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering and received an MBA from Santa Clara University.
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