Partnering for Success in 2014
Like most companies this time of year, we’ve been focused on finalizing Egnyte’s 2014 Operating Plan and setting a trajectory for our next stage of explosive growth. As a Business Development leader, I’ve worked with my team to incorporate a strategic focus around growing and strengthening our base of channel, technology alliance and developer partnerships. For a company at our stage of growth, selecting the right partners, developing long-term relationships and setting a course for mutual benefit is essential to our continued success.
In our technology alliance program, the primary objective is to increase the value of our respective products by building integrations that can deliver seamlessly-integrated solutions for our customers. When properly executed through mutual DemandGen activities, these bundles can diversify and extend our reach into the market. The combined solutions should also reduce friction in the adoption process and increase sales velocity. Often, these alliances result in fruitful new sales and marketing channels with highly desirable conversion rates for both Egnyte and our partners, as well as provides enhanced functionality and capabilities to our customers.As you might imagine, there was extensive outreach to our networks across the industry throughout this planning process. We met dozens of current and prospective partners in an effort aligned with our product goals and go-to-market plans for the year.Within the last few weeks, we had an opportunity to visit business development and marketing leaders from OneLogin, a leading enterprise identity management software company. OneLogin’s technology helps to secure and drive adoption of a wide range of IT services such as Egnyte’s enterprise file-sharing platform. We had lunch at their beautiful headquarters overlooking the Bay in San Francisco’s Financial District.
OneLogin and Egnyte are both focused on delivering enterprise IT services for business. We’ve had a technical integration between our products for more than a year, and during this time, the partnership has grown organically through hundreds of mutual customer successes. The OneLogin Free Plan for Egnyte has enabled many organizations that have adopted our solution to get single sign-on service quickly -- and it’s Free! This relationship has had a positive impact on Egnyte’s business, and we naturally wanted to explore ways to yield additional value through product evolution and a well-coordinated Biz Dev effort.Throughout the discovery process, we found that our organizations share a similar corporate culture and that there was natural alignment in our market segmentation and sales models. Customer feedback about the joint solution has always been solid, and it got us thinking about ways to evolve the technical integration and align our resources toward programmatic DemandGen campaigns and channel activities. We left the meeting with some concrete ideas and goals that we expect will have a positive impact on our businesses and for our customers in the near future.This is just one example of the many technology alliances and partner opportunities Egnyte is developing for 2014. We have hundreds of partners across a landscape of storage, security, mobility and business applications, as well as VARs, MSPs and developers. Already in January, we announced a new partnership with a leading NAS provider Synology at CES, and customers can expect frequent and similar top-notch partner activities that will span the next several quarters.Does your installed base use Egnyte or ask about file sharing, sync and storage for business? Do you offer technology that would serve as a valuable companion to the Egnyte platform?Maybe your company is one of Egnyte’s next strategic partners. Contact us at bd@egnyte.com and let’s find out.
*Bart Giordano is an enterprise technology executive with more than 15 years of experience in systems and software engineering, marketing and business development across the information security, wireless and cloud landscapes. He is currently Sr. Director of Business Development for Egnyte’s enterprise file-sharing platform. Be sure to follow him on Twitter: @bgiordan.
