More and More Vendors Competing for the Mouse’s Share of the Business

Egnyte exhibited at Gartner Symposium ITxpo two weeks ago, and I was shocked at how many new companies were there that had some form of cloud-only file sharing. Of course, there were the typical companies that enable you to drop files into a folder that will sync to the cloud for sharing and mobile access. But there were also a few companies that added file-sharing capabilities to the files that were backed up from their computer.

The nice thing about this situation was that it was easy for us to explain how Egnyte is different, especially after the attendees visited the cloud-only solutions. We simply said that we can do the same cloud-only file sharing that the gazillion other vendors do but can enable the accessing and sharing of files DIRECTLY from ANY on-premise storage device – all from the same interface.We discussed a study from IDG Research showing that less than 10% of files are stored in the cloud and that 61% of files will NEVER go into the cloud due to security concerns.  While most of our booth visitors knew that large files and the cloud simply do not mix because of performance issues, they all knew how that it’s virtually impossible to move even a moderate amount of data to the cloud.Their eyes lit up when we showed them Egnyte’s single interface into all of the files a user has permission to access, whether it is the less than 10% in the cloud or the 90% that is stored behind the firewall. And their ears really perked up when we told them that the same great features (encryption on the device, remote wipe, offline sync control, etc.) are available regardless of where the files are stored - in our cloud, any public cloud, or in any type of on-premises storage. They truly understood the power of separating the cloud-based control plane from the storage plane and the access path to that storage.I want to extend a hearty welcome to all the new entrants adding more competition to the overly crowded, 39% of the file sharing market that’s focused solely on cloud-only file-sharing. We’re happy to bring our cloud-based solution to that party and highlight great features like sub-folder permissions and sub-folder sync. However, we’re also quite happy to engage in the much less crowded 61% of the market that cannot use cloud-only file sharing but want a single solution that is simple for users and secure for IT.