A Diary of a Company Relaunch

Why would a company with over 30,000 paid customers and over a million paid users decide to relaunch its company? Why rock the boat if business is going well?

We’re in the file-sharing business, and until we relaunched, we were often confused with consumer-file sharing solutions, even though our sole focus is on the enterprise. And while consumer file-sharing services have helped the whole industry by exposing how traditional file sharing methods are too burdensome for users, these solutions require files to be stored in the cloud in order to be shared or accessed using mobile devices.  The very nature of these solutions has translated to departmental adoption unmanaged by IT that could, in theory, put the entire business - and its data - at risk.Now more than ever, businesses are nervous about the cloud due to privacy concerns driven by programs such as PRISM that can apparently request data legally – and in complete secret. They’re also experiencing security fears driven by the admission of multiple security breaches from consumer cloud file-sharing services, including Dropbox and Skydrive.What’s the big deal? The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has estimated that PRISM will cost U.S. companies relying on cloud technology between $22 billion and $35 billion over the next three years. Forrester analyst James Staten noted that the ITIF is too low and estimates the impact could be as high as $180 billion or a 25 percent hit to overall IT service provider revenues in that same timeframe. To top it all off - according to a recent IDG Research survey, 61 percent of files will never go into the cloud due to security concerns, which makes cloud-only solutions very troublesome in the eyes of today’s businesses.

In light of this new security-sensitive climate, we realized that we needed to adapt and evolve our solution, messaging and positioning to align with the current pain points of this industry as it transitions from a departmental decision maker to an IT decision maker. As a file-sharing company, we saw this big opportunity to focus our business on delivering a solution that can combine the business benefits of a cloud service, or SaaS, with the traditional, tried-and-true greatness of on-premise storage.

This relaunch hasn’t “rocked the boat” for our company or our customers. In fact, we were pleasantly surprised at how many of our customers wanted to add private file sharing of data behind their firewall to their service. This relaunch does, however, aim to rock the industry by changing the definition of what it takes to deliver a truly enterprise-grade solution; one that enables businesses to securely access 100% of their data wherever it’s stored, with zero concern for data exposure or vulnerabilities due to security breaches or privacy incursions.

So six months ago, we decided that rebranding our company would send the message that we have fundamentally shifted focus as a company and substantially evolved our platform. We are no longer “just another cloud file-sharing service;” we are the ONLY enterprise-grade file-sharing solution on the market that can provide secure and seamless file access from any device regardless of where files are stored. Period.

The launch took a full company and community effort - from our development teams who created the new Storage Connect functionality to Marketing who overhauled our website and logos. Our Board provided guidance on our direction and messaging, while our customers helped us understand how we could address more of their key pain points through our solution. And everyone across the company worked countless hours to deliver the best solution and provide the best support for customers and partners.

We believe that our customers deserve to have 100% control over their data – from where it resides, who can access it, and control how it is accessed. It’s time for the market to offer a file-sharing service that allows businesses to store and access data from any cloud and from any on-premises storage device; one that seamlessly integrates with popular business solutions to mesh with how business today operate and will also scale as businesses continue to change. Best of all, it is the same simple user experience that we have always had regardless where the files are stored.

With Egnyte, companies now have the best of both worlds - IT can take back control, while employees have the flexibility and freedom to access and share ALL of the files they need to get their jobs done.