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With so many cloud service providers out there, IT Channel Expert caught up with Ian McEwan, vice president of EMEA at Egnyte, to see what the firm is doing differently to stand out from the crowd…
What does Egnyte do?
Egnyte is able to offer a hybrid on-prem and cloud solution. That’s the unique thing that we do.
How do you stand out from other cloud providers?
There are a lot of vendors in this space, but a lot of them push customers completely to their cloud. We offer a variety of integrations but it’s simple and straightforward to use. What we say is: any data on any device, from anywhere.
If they don’t want to use the Egnyte cloud and they want to use cloud products from Amazon, Google and others, we can adapt to that and make it work.
We have a nice application store that works with almost any device. Then on the back end, on-prem, we can integrate with any of the major storage vendors that are out there.
Are you seeing an increase in awareness of the cloud?
We are definitely seeing an increase in awareness of cloud applications. We tend to see companies that use the cloud but have some parts of the business that they want stored on the premises. But now we’re also seeing what we call second-generation customers who have started up completely on the cloud.
How has the cloud services market changed over the years?
There are two things that have changed over the years. Firstly, there’s a lot more education that’s been done at the customer level, as they’re demanding more from the platform. Businesses are not necessarily looking just at the short-term relationship, they’re looking for a platform that can flex, adapt and grow as they grow.
The other thing we’re seeing is that the IT industry is becoming like other services – there’s a lot of companies offering similar services, so users don’t have to be loyal to a particular cloud provider any more. We have a pretty strong retention because of our flexible solutions that work with customers of different sizes and those that are growing.
What’s next for Egnyte?
We are starting to see a lot more interest coming from government and education. We’re planning to continue to get user adoption and trying to get ourselves out of the congested pack of vendors and really help our partners work on how they manage their data.
