Yesterday we sent out a press release highlighting our momentum in two industries. 1,500 construction/engineering customers and 1,000 advertising/media customers are a proof-point of the value of a hybrid approach to file sharing. While most industries are adopting file sharing, these two industries are interesting as they share common needs where cloud-only file sharing solutions fall apart. Both industries have large files sizes that are getting bigger every year. Not only do these industries have to collaborate on these files across geographically separate offices, but they also require a solution that lets them do so securely with both their clients and partners.

A hybrid approach to file sharing includes the use of both local storage and cloud storage. Local storage provides the fastest access speed possible, does not clog the connection to the Internet, and provides business continuity in case of Internet outage. Cloud provides accessibility to remote employees, business partners, and clients. What’s most interesting is that combining local storage plus cloud is not just additive, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – especially when it comes to construction/engineering and advertising/media companies.

Having local storage in two office locations with the cloud in between enables teams in those geographically separated offices to work as though they are in the same room. Each team has fast local access to the local storage in their office while the cloud quickly and efficiently synchronizes project changes between the geographically separated local storage devices. It’s like having a 3000 mile LAN. Large media and engineering files further highlight the requirement for hybrid as cloud-only solutions simply cannot provide the performance these teams need to collaborate effectively on projects.

I may be dating myself, but this reminds me of a Reese’s commercial where a person with peanut butter ran into a person with chocolate. They discovered that the combination of peanut butter and chocolate was much better than peanut butter or chocolate separately. This is the same phenomenon that happens when you combine local storage and cloud in file sharing.

Today, we are introducing Egnyte WebEdit to enable you to open any file stored in Egnyte directly from a browser, edit in the appropriate application (word/excel/powerpoint/keynote/adobe cs6/autocad etc) and simply save it back. You do not have to go through a multi-step process of download, edit, save and upload anymore.

The application is ideal for users who do not want to load Egnyte Map Drive or Personal Local Cloud (Desktop Sync) on their computer, and is more convenient than downloading, editing, saving and uploading the saved version back to the cloud.  Egnyte WebEdit is available to Administrators and Power Users.

This application is available as a pre-beta product. If you are interested in WebEdit, please contact us so we can enable this for your account. We welcome your feedback.

When I first started Egnyte around 5 years ago, I visualized what success would look like, and while our journey is far from done, I am pretty proud of our team and what we’ve managed to accomplish so far. A stellar group of investors, $33 Million raised, 3.5x growth in booking from 2011 to 2012, and the release of a series of great product features and improvements. These are all things to be proud of, but there’s a lot more to do, and in support of our growth, and our focus on the enterprise we’ve brought on some serious talent to our board and executive staff.

Today’s announcement is yet another milestone in what looks to be another exciting year at Egnyte. First, I’d like to welcome Mike Klayko as the newest member of our board of directors. Mike has been a key player in silicon valley over the last 35 years and truly understands the needs of the enterprise. Most recently he was CEO of Brocade, and before that an exec at EMC, HP and IBM to name a few, he will help us solidify our place in today’s enterprise. Also announced today, Tom Reilly, former CEO of ArcSight and board member of Eloqua, will join our board of advisors. His deep understanding of sales and growth strategies is going to be extremely important as we take Egnyte through this next phase.

Last but not least, I’m thrilled to announce two additions to our executive leadership. Barry Phillips has joined Egnyte as the chief marketing officer, and Steve Sutter as chief financial officer. Both Barry and Steve bring significant executive experience, and deep understanding of what it takes to be a great enterprise software company. They have both built teams in high growth enterprise software companies, and have hit the ground running.

This is a great moment at Egnyte, and I’m so glad that I’m able to share some of my thoughts and feelings with you. I feel inspired and enthusiastic to tackle the rest of this year, and encourage you to keep watching our blog for new announcements on a regular basis.

The net is indeed a difficult place to navigate, and while we would like to think everyone has the best of intentions, it does not always turn out that way.  It was recently brought to our attention that a customer of Egnyte had a piece of malware hosted on our system that may have been shared publicly. We take these situations very seriously, and once it was brought to our attention, we followed the standard process of suspending the account, locking access, notifying the owner and filing a report with the IC3 (a partnership between the FBI and NWCCC).

While we always respect the privacy of each customer’s encrypted data, we will act swiftly both internally and by alerting authorities, when malicious or illegal activity is brought to our attention.  It’s also important to note that if a user unknowingly uploads an infected file to their account in Egnyte, it is completely prevented from infecting any other file within that account or other accounts.  We’re very vigilant in our quest to serve our customers in the best way possible, and that includes monitoring possible threats and being aware of advisories with regards to viruses and malware.

Egnyte is committed to acting quickly to ensure the safety and security of the global internet community and will never knowingly act as a harbor for illegal activities.

Kris Lahiri, Chief Security Officer and VP Operations