Recently, at Dreamforce 2016, Egnyte announced that it has chosen Microsoft Azure as the go-to storage option for new Egnyte customers. The company now boasts the ability to offer customers end-to-end solutions for building their digital workplace with a variety of integrations such as Azure AD, Azure Key Vault, Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Office Mobile, and Microsoft SharePoint Online. The announcement means that Egnyte is strengthening its relationship with Microsoft and making a commitment to the enterprise to provide the best-in-class solutions for both IT and end users.
If you’re not familiar with Egnyte, they are a leading cloud provider of smart content collaboration and governance for the enterprise. The brainchild of co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain, the company’s product is high on security, yet incorporates a hybrid, open architecture that allows them create end-to-end integrations across user apps, content, and infrastructure. You may have heard about their main competitors like Box.com and Dropbox. Those are consumer-grade brands that grew towards the enterprise, while Egnyte started and has remained an enterprise-first product.
Cozy futures
It is clear that both companies recognize the potential they hold in this relationship. Praising Egnyte’s open architecture, Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer eXperience & Evangelism (DX) group, stated, “Our joint customers will be able to select Microsoft Azure storage as the backbone of their infrastructure.” Meanwhile, Egnyte is making its Egnyte Connect solution available to Azure customers in the Azure Marketplace as part of its open market strategy.
In a statement on this relationship, Jain praised Microsoft’s position as “the strongest suite of services for business on the market.”
Azure rising
One of my passions is documenting how the concept of the monolithic public mega-cloud is facing a well-deserved demise. Today’s applications and business needs require far more control, far more specialization, and far friendlier integration that you will find in your average super-size mega-cloud product. Yes, I’m talking about AWS. Azure is proving that relationships matter on every level. Keeping the cloud easy to consume, easy to integrate, and in many ways, familiar, are the factors that are producing the wins that Azure and Microsoft are taking home.
Since he took over the company, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was quick to make the ‘cloud first’ strategy the linchpin of what will be his lasting legacy. Partner relationships are a critical part of that success story, and the addition of a powerful enterprise-focused document platform into its ranks only proves this continued success. The question is whether Microsoft will continue to build up a powerful ecosystem of services around its cloud, or whether things will go the way of the Windows App Store (I own a Windows phone, and know that pain). My money’s on the former of those possibilities.
(Disclosure: The author goes a ways back with Egnyte, having previously authored the company’s marketing content.)
Image source: Pexels
