A tale of two Egnytes

Until a few days ago, Egnyte was just Egnyte – the vendor, the product, the same thing. What you got were the storage-agnostic hybrid file services we first covered in our On the Radar report a couple of years ago. This week, though, the company launched a new hybrid data governance solution (Egnyte Protect), which also saw its trademark EFSS solution re-branded as Egnyte Connect.

Egnyte Protect brings access control, data retention, data residency, and selective encryption capabilities to a SaaS service which can be deployed to range over content stored on-premise, or in the cloud. And not just in Egnyte Connect’s cloud, either. Protect supports a number of third-party repositories and EFSS solutions, such as Box and SharePoint.

Prior to the launch of Egnyte Protect, the company devoted some time to refresh the Connect product too. It’s been furnished with improved mobility apps recently and improved Microsoft Office integrations alongside support for Google Apps and Salesforce.

Egnyte’s twin solutions still don’t cover more sophisticated workflow and business application integrations (beyond sharing and productivity apps), so it’s still more about sharing, editing, storing, securing, and reporting on content – rather than putting it to work deeper into enterprise applications. So no case management ambitions, as yet (which is the route some of its competitors are taking to add value to their offerings)..

However, that’s not really what the company has been about anyway. It’s focused on providing enterprise file services optimised for hybrid cloud / on-premise scenarios (where many EFSS providers have stuck with the public cloud); and now it’s distilled (and enhanced) content governance services into the standalone Egnyte Protect so that customers can benefit from its sophisticated capabilities no matter where (or with whom) their content is stored.

As that EFSS and storage start to commodify, the future belongs to vendors that can quickly recognise their differentiation and package value-adding services that, though they may well be described as working “better together” with their corresponding EFSS or ECM stablemates, nevertheless are able to demonstrate a high degree of repository agnosticism when it comes to playing well with others.

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