IT Lab and Egnyte: An Award-Winning Partnership

"The needs of our customers are evolving. They want IT that helps them gain competitive advantage in their markets, that’s reliable and that makes a difference to their businesses and their people."

Geoff Kneen

Managing Director • IT Lab

An Award-Winning Partnership

Small and medium-sized companies across the UK are on the hunt for an IT-enabled competitive advantage. For many, that means a journey to the cloud–one that’s fast, trouble-free and delivers real world returns. IT Lab, in partnership with Egnyte, makes this happen.

Established in London in 2001 to support the needs of small businesses in the Capital, IT Lab has grown rapidly. Today, the multi-award-winning company employs over 700 people and serves clients across the UK and beyond from its London, Milton Keynes, Manchester and Cape Town, South Africa offices.

It’s a business obsessed with service. Whether that’s helping the British Paralympic Association operate securely at the Pyeong Chang Paralympic Winter Games, or supporting the global ambitions of speciality pharmaceutical company, Theramex, IT Lab prides itself on going the extra mile. It’s future-focused and committed to making a difference for its clients and their people, which led to its 2018 award as Egnyte’s MSP Programme Partner of the Year.

A Burgeoning Relationship

The partnership began in 2015 as IT Lab explored new ways to address the old problems of inflexible, on-premises infrastructure for its clients. In a world of changing workstyles, evolving technologies and new consumption models, traditional file server environments were looking decidedly dated. Particularly in light of new, scalable, cloud-based options.

By working with Egnyte, IT Lab can address a broad range of client issues across both IT and business operations–from eliminating the VPN and remote access problems typically associated with legacy file servers, through to enhancing document sharing, version control and collaboration to support today’s increasingly mobile workforces. Plus, with detailed reporting through an easy-to-use dashboard, clients can manage access rights and boost compliance.

IT Lab found Egnyte’s user interface refreshingly functional and familiar to its users, being a primary catalyst for rapid user adoption with minimal training or change management required. Clients are assured reliability, resilience and enterprise-level security, building upon the trust they have in IT Lab’s service.

“Egnyte takes clients away from traditional file server structures – enabling users to access their work and share files with colleagues, securely from any place and at any time.”

Geoff Kneen

Managing Director

But IT Lab’s decision to work with Egnyte wasn’t just about the features and functionality it could deliver for clients. As a channel partner, relationships matter. IT Lab needed a partner that values the channel, understands its challenges and provides a level of commercial flexibility it can pass on to clients. All this, alongside Egnyte’s dedicated channel team and comprehensive partner support were critical in the decision-making.

As the relationship developed, it quickly became apparent that both partners shared the same service-obsessed ethos. IT lab received rapid response to questions from their Egnyte account managers, Egnyte’s service delivery teams and even, Egnyte executives, if needed. Such is the strength and openness of the partnership so there’s never a hitch in the service IT Lab provides its clients.

“We started working with Egnyte because they were channel-focused. They had a separate partnerships team within the organisation, and had our best interests at heart.”

Geoff Kneen

Managing Director

Delivering Customer Value

Today, over 70 IT Lab clients use Egnyte across a wide spectrum of industries, including financial services, transport and logistics, construction and architecture, recruitment and the non-profit sector. From 20 seats to 450, each project is different. For some, an Egnyte deployment is part of a wider strategic move to the cloud. For others, it’s a question of data transparency, regaining control of permissions and tackling shadow IT–often as part of a compliance programme. In the construction and architecture arenas, the focus is often on Egnyte’s ability to effortlessly and securely transfer massive files and drawings to remote sites.

But without exception, all IT Lab clients are able to embrace a more flexible approach to managing, securing, and collaborating on the files and data they need to get the job done, anywhere at any time. With many of its clients on a transformational journey to the cloud, Egnyte allows IT Lab to move them quickly, cost effectively and without disruption. It eliminates the pains of legacy infrastructures, and allows IT Lab to deliver a secure solution that makes a real difference to the business and its people.

“A lot of our clients are on a transformational journey to the cloud. Egnyte allows us to move them quickly, cost-effectively and without disruption to their business.”

Geoff Kneen

Managing Director