Partnering for Success Across the Channel

Egnyte has experienced impressive growth over the last year. Since coming on board in early 2013, I have witnessed an expansion from 70 employees to more than 200 globally, a move into a 30,000 square foot headquarters, as well as new or expanded offices in New York, Spokane, London, and Poland. What we’ve realized as we grow, so does our need for a stronger channel to meet the exponential growth in demand for a hybrid approach to file sharing and storage. So, to field and support the channel, we recently introduced a re-tooled and simplified partner program with two tiers where partners can earn recurring commission up to 30%.

We recently partnered with Sigma Solutions, an Elite partner with a large presence in the Midwest that specializes in desktop, mobile computing and collaboration. We decided to co-sponsor an event called Interface in Dallas with them that promised to provide benefits for both Sigma Solutions and Egnyte. Interface produces accredited educational conferences for IT professionals, focusing on the latest developments in information security, IT infrastructure and communications. This is an ideal event for both of our teams to chat with IT and end users about their business goals and needs.

How did it go? Really well! Sigma Solutions has some very strong relationships in the Dallas area and, coincidently, Interface drew some of those big-named customers to the event. Doors opened and within minutes, my colleagues and I working the booth were fielding a steady stream of questions from customers and prospects alike. All of them wanted to learn more about Egnyte and what we have to offer.Collectively, we spoke with many enterprise attendees throughout the day and one theme kept surfacing; most attendees shared their frustration with employees using freemium products to share business files, and they weren’t ready to address this or didn’t have the cycles to do so. Many felt they were losing control and falling victim to Shadow IT. Here’s a great example of this from an attendee we spoke with at the event:A marketing department within a large enterprise company needs a dedicated letter drive for the sharing of large files. The IT department didn’t have the time, resources or bandwidth to implement a solution so, left to their own devices, the marketing department found their own freemium cloud solution for sharing, editing, creating and collaborating on their files. This presented IT with a big problem because they don’t know where their business data is going and who can access it. After talking through this major pain point, Egnyte’s enterprise-grade solution was very appealing to this attendee (as well as most of the attendees we spoke with) and was viewed as a way to give IT back the control while offering the features and functionality their internal teams are requesting.Overall, this was the perfect storm for Egnyte and Sigma Solutions. Egnyte is looking to gain strong partners, and Sigma views us as a net-new revenue stream that can help strengthen and maintain an existing customer base or identify new opportunities with new prospects they might not have considered before. Needless to say, we will be sponsoring more cities and look forward to finding new ways to support our Elite partners. Will your company be the one we partner with next? Feel free to reach out to us - resellers@egnyte.com. We’d love to chat about how we can partner together.

Click here to learn more about our partner program and all of the benefits of joining us!

*Ross Kemp is a director of business development at Egnyte.  He manages our Storage Partner ecosystem and has been in the industry for 20+ years.  When not at work, he loves spending time with his family, checking out vintage cars and making wine. Be sure to follow him on Twitter: @KRossKemp.