Egnyte has turned separate file sharing and protection services in the cloud into a unified content services offering with tiered storage and machine learning technology for better analytics.
The US venture-backed company offers on-premises and in-the-cloud file sharing and collaboration for enterprises, and claims 16,000 customers and a $100m revenue run rate.
Egnyte took in $75m of funding in 2018. It is using the money to expand, and will reach a total of 770 employees by the end of the year, with 225 added in the last six months. There are now more than 220 engineers in Poland and 35 employees in the UK.
Egnyte content services platform
CEO Vineet Jain told us in a briefing that the companyt’s cloud customers are increasingly buying separate services, Egnyte Connect and Egnyte Protect, in a single transaction.
He said: “Customers wanted one solution; a platform story converging content and governance. a content services platform category has been emerging.”
Egnyte customers accelerated moves towards the cloud from 2017 in response to growing volumes of unstructured data. File sharing was their primary need, according to Jain. “We thought they would move quite slowly, but under-estimated the speed. It was exponential, not linear.”
Now 45 to 50 per cent of Egnyte’s customers have a hybrid, on-premises and public cloud strategy. The others are all-in to the cloud. Jain thinks the IT world will stay hybrid, and not abandon on-premises installations.
As Egnyte’s customers moved to the cloud they wanted both file sharing and file security and governance. Egnyte saw “two colliding worlds going in one direction”.
The customers also wanted to control storage costs and Egnyte’s new content services offering has three-tiered cloud storage with fast access, medium access and slow access data tiers.
Jain said: “We’re actively working on data minimisation and use heuristics and policies to archive colder data. Generally, only three to five per cent of data is active.”
The software manages data egress and ingress charges to keep these low. It also uses machine learning technology to provide better governance, data classification and control for compliance and data privacy regulations. Egnyte’s software supports GDPR-type rules in 50 separate jurisdictions.
