It’s Decision Time: A Look Back at the Midsize Enterprise Summit (East)

It’s Decision Time. I recently got back from the Midsize Enterprise Summit (MES) East 2015, and this theme of “decision time” truly dictated the tone of the entire event. The conference featured great conversations in the exhibit hall, boardroom leader sessions and from knowledgeable speakers. In this dynamic environment, I am sure that several decisions and plans for next steps came out of this event.During a session on the state of the Mid-market, Andrew Lerner, research director at Gartner, listed the top five priorities for this segment, which included “Cloud” and “Infrastructure/Datacenter” topics. As such, it was a natural place for Egnyte to showcase our Adaptive Enterprise File Services, since we can offer these enterprise and mid-market leaders an infrastructure that can be deployed to fit to their needs - cloud, on-prem or hybrid, and one that addresses the concerns with other cloud services.

Throughout the event, an ensemble of CIOs, IT Directors, and other IT leaders huddled in boardrooms to discuss their technology challenges, strategies, and projects. These leaders attended to meet their peers, talk shop about challenges they run into and see how others have solved similar problems.I noticed many common themes during the sessions and discussions I was able to attend. And, it was great to hear that most of these common pain points can be solved by using Egnyte. For example, many organizations have tried to deploy other cloud solutions but then quickly realized the limitations of those approaches. They liked what cloud services could provide from a productivity perspective but didn’t like that it gave so much power to the individual user. Once shared, a file was outside of the company’s control, introducing issues around scaling, permissions, versions, and data ownership. These solutions also lacked strong central administration, visibility, or audibility.Additionally, these cloud services did not integrate with on-premises hardware, meaning file access would have to come from the cloud. Slow internet, slow access. No internet, no access. Bandwidth concerns also made deploying cloud services in offices problematic with large file sizes quickly slowing down productivity. Due to these concerns of control and scalability, cloud services have been slow to adopt in the mid-market.It was nice to participate in these discussions, since I could share how Egnyte addresses these pain points. Egnyte offers a secure way to share and access  files, with flexible deployment options across a company’s choice of on-premises and cloud storage. IT and business users get extraordinary flexibility and mobility, and provides the control and visibility that corporate data requires.  This was the message we delivered to the audience at MES, and judging by the booth traffic and conversations, it was very well-received.We found among the crowd of IT leaders some who had already deployed our services. Having been at Egnyte for years and having helped many clients, I had expectations about what we’d hear. By and large, it was confirmed.There were medical and financial firms that had deployed Egnyte because we provided the secure, central control and audits needed for them to maintain their compliance requirements. There was also a construction firm that uses Egnyte to move large files to remote job sites and to securely share them with their subcontractors. But what I was not expecting were the theoretical physicists. Egnyte is being used by one of the largest collections of theoretical physicists since the Manhattan Project. It blew my mind to think our services are helping to uncover some of the most fundamental questions of reality!All in all, the event was fantastic. While the show may be over, “decision time” is still in the air as these companies go back and act upon some of the discussions and key takeaways from this event. I’m looking forward to continuing to grow our presence in the mid-market later this year as we attend MES West! Be sure to stop by and say hello if you are attending the next event.