Pliancy Empowers Its Life Science Clients to Scale with Ease

“Egnyte has proven perfect for helping new companies build an IT launch point that sets them up for success, whether in security, CRO collaboration, or any other IT need a life sciences startup may have.”

David Cole

Technical Product Manager • Pliancy

When emerging life sciences companies come to IT services provider Pliancy, they’re looking for tech they can grow into as they move from a crawl to a sprint. For Pliancy, success depends on their ability to deliver clients the kind of flexible, cost-effective solutions they need without having to handhold every step of the way.

With Pliancy’s support, biotech companies can implement Egnyte to build cloud-hosted file management ecosystems that work just as well for five employees as for 500. As a result, they spend more time focusing on their mission and less time putting out fires.

Challenge: Clear Obstacles Impeding Client Growth

The majority of Pliancy’s clients are emerging life science companies with little to no in-house IT staff. They come to Pliancy ready to grow, but often don’t have the day-to-day technical systems in place to support that growth. For Pliancy’s team, the goal is not only to connect clients with the tools they need today, but set them up with systems that can grow with them tomorrow.

“When it’s a brand new, out-of-the-box company, that’s when we have the biggest heart-to-heart,” says David Cole, Technical Product Manager at Pliancy. “We focus on things like: What are your requirements? What do you want to be able to do in five years?”

One of the biggest challenges during these conversations, Cole says, is helping clients who have found themselves stuck with massive amounts of technical debt from previous file management vendors. “Life science companies work with CROs more and more these days,” he notes, and many that do come to him are trapped in a “spider web of permissions” that hobble their growth potential. “There’s a shared drive and the personal drive, and then there’s this other group that’s on this different shared drive.”

All of this creates plenty of growing pains for teams that want to scale their operations quickly instead of spending their time navigating complex permissions environments.

Solution: Fast, Sustainable Growth Without Costly Roadblocks

Life science companies who choose to implement Egnyte can gracefully move through each phase of their company’s growth with ease. One story that encapsulates this involves an incubator in Menlo Park, California that came to Pliancy when the team outgrew their current setup.

“When they came to us, they were in an incubator space with shared networks, spaces, and labs,” Cole explains. To help facilitate seamless collaboration during the transition to a new lab space, Pliancy helped them deploy Egnyte with role-based file access permissions, and later added Storage Sync. What began as a five-person operation quickly grew to 60. Later on, the team realized they needed extra security and governance functionality, and enlisted Pliancy’s help to upgrade to a Platform Enterprise plan. “This kind of progression is pretty common with our life science companies that start on Egnyte,” says Cole.

For clients that choose to scale with Egnyte, Pliancy says the benefits are three-fold:

• Flexibility
  As Cole explains, there are several layers to Egnyte that make it easy for companies to scale, with one of them being flexibility. “Once a client comes in, and we set up their folder structure and their per-user provisioning in Egnyte, maybe they say they want to add a lab. Well, great, they can deploy Storage Sync. Or if they say they’re getting too much storage, no problem, we can add an archiving domain. This kind of flexibility is great for companies who want to launch quickly without having to do a huge migration, which a lot of other companies would require.”
• Ease of use
  Pliancy Escalations Engineer Brandon Kimbler shared another story of a client who moved a folder by accident in Egnyte. When the help ticket came in, Egnyte made it simple to solve the problem in no time. “I have reports running daily. I checked one of the reports, found the user in five seconds and found the exact way they moved it. We were immediately able to give them peace of mind.”
• Cost and time savings
  With such easy and efficient administration, the Pliancy team says their customers are able to avoid unnecessary issues and save valuable time and money. Sales Engineer Noah Tagliaferri tells clients, “You can go with another solution besides Egnyte. But you’ll likely end up calling us more, and spending more money, when bugs or permission problems start popping up.”

Benefits: A Flexible Solution That’s Easy to Recommend

Both Pliancy and its clients benefit from Egnyte. Tagliaferri says Egnyte allows him and his Pliancy sales team to reduce excess labor and focus on more high-value work. Whether it’s pulling reports, figuring out permissions, or resolving more complex client issues, Tagliaferri says it quickly adds up to more work on his end.

“There’s a lot less labor involved…It frees us up to do more important things. And on the sales side at least, being able to explain and show how Egnyte can be used for life sciences is a selling point for us, because it allows us to show our expertise”.

Noah Tagliaferri

Sales Engineer • Pliancy

Cole echoes this, explaining how Egnyte’s responsive support team not only makes the technology easy to work with, but easy to recommend to clients.

“I’ve worked with other software providers that are difficult to have a conversation with when issues arise. But Egnyte always has answers. That’s one of the reasons Egnyte stays on my list of highly recommended vendors.”

David Cole

Technical Product Manager • Pliancy

Thanks to the benefits for everyone involved, Kimbler says Egnyte will continue to be a “simple, safe, and flexible” go-to for Pliancy’s life science clients moving forward. “Egnyte has proven perfect for helping new companies build an IT launch point that sets them up for success, whether in security, CRO collaboration, or any other IT need a life sciences startup may have. We fully intend to keep Egnyte at the center of our conversations with the new clients we’re bringing in.”

Kimbler ends with a few words of advice to future clients: "Egnyte makes our clients feel safe. Once we get the system set up and dialed in, they have full confidence that my team will be able to provide them the support they need, and that they’re in good hands. If you’re an ascending player in the life sciences space, I think Egnyte is the perfect cloud file sharing platform, both for where you are today and where you’ll be five years from now.”