Guest Blogger Barry Phillips, Chief Marketing Officer, is responsible for marketing at Egnyte. Prior to Egnyte, Barry was the CMO of Wanova (acquired by VMware) where he led Marketing, Sales, and Business Development. Barry came to Wanova from Citrix Systems, where he was the Group Vice President and GM of the Delivery Center Product Group. Barry holds a Bachelors of Computer Science from the United States Naval Academy and a Master of Computer Science from UCLA.
Community IT helps nonprofits implement the Egnyte hybrid file sharing solution. If your organization is interested in learning more, please fill out the Contact Us form, call (202) 234-1600 or email connect[at]communityit.com. Check out the success story how we helped Young Playwrights’ Theater implement Egnyte.
1. Can you please tell us more about your company?
Egnyte was founded in 2007 by co-founders Vineet Jain, Amrit Jassal, Rajesh Ram and Kris Lahiri. The company is based in Mountain View, California and has more than 170 employees. Egnyte supports 30,000+ customers across USA, Canada, Europe and Asia, with data centers on the east and west coasts of the United States and in Western Europe. Investors of Egnyte include Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Floodgate Fund and Polaris Venture Partners.
2. What was the impetus behind Egnyte creating a hybrid approach to file-sharing?
According to a recent IDG Research study, less than 10% of files are in the cloud today, and 61% of files will never be placed in the cloud due to security concerns. Noting this major pain point for our customers and the industry to easily and securely access files that need to stay out of the cloud, we created an approach that enables organizations to share files from any device and from any location files are stored: in any on-premise storage device, in the cloud or a combination of both, which is known as hybrid file sharing.
3. What role does Egnyte play in the nonprofit sector?
Egnyte has quite a few nonprofit customers. In addition to the ability to connect to files on local storage devices while inside or outside of the office, our unique sub-folder permissioning capability combined with our cloud solution is popular with nonprofit organizations.
Sub-folder permissions enable nonprofits to maintain a single directory tree and assign unique permissions to folders within the tree. This enables donors and recipient organizations to have private sharing capabilities with the nonprofit.
We offer up to 15% on our Enterprise plan. We also provide support to them through the helpdesk site, which helps to guide and support our customers and allows them to engage with the community.
4. What were some breakthroughs from this past year?
In 2013, we focused on strengthening our platform to provide top security and flexibility for our customers. In September we introduced Storage Connect, which enables users to access data behind the firewall without touching the cloud. Users can now access their files from any device, any location and from any form of storage to increase security and keep prying eyes off of sensitive data. Earlier this year, we also introduced seamless integrations with key technology partners – Google Drive, DocuSign (electronic signatures) and Attchements.me, to name a few.
5. What are some things you are working on for 2014?
From a product perspective, we will keep enhancing Storage Connect. The interest in the ability to have a simple, cloud-based file sharing service combined with all the files that live behind the firewall has been incredible.
Questions about Egnyte?
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