StartUp Beat

SUB: What is your primary value proposition for users?

Vineet Jain: Egnyte provides an on-demand file server for small businesses to store all corporate data, share within and outside the company and allow backup of personal computers.  It eliminates all hardware, point solutions like tape based backup, ftp, vpn, etc., and all management overhead with the server in the cloud.  Best of all, you get this on-demand file server with unlimited storage at 1/8th the cost compared to doing it yourself.

I strongly believe that the key to fast adoption is to keep the learning curve as low as possible.  This was done by leveraging the best known paradigms–My Computer on Windows or Finder on Mac.  Egnyte allows the users to access the file server natively from their desktop, in addition from any web browser.  We are learning from experience that if the user does not get the product in 5-to-7 minutes, the chances of them continuing to use it go down dramatically.  Therefore, we have made an intense effort to provide a simple, yet not simplistic, product.

SUB: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?

Vineet Jain: Previous to Egnyte, I founded a startup called Valdero, funded by KPCB, Trinity and MDV.  After having cut my teeth on how to successfully build a company, I and three others, were looking at what do next after a successful exit in September, 2005.  The SMB market was quite appealing since the opportunity is large.

We focused on the three trends–a.) commoditization of storage; b.) easy availability of broadband; and c.) teams getting more distributed or remote.  All these three coupled with the gradual acceptance of hosted solutions, got us convinced that this was an idea to pursue.  The idea to provide “Infrastructure On Demand” was born as a result.  The Egnyte On Demand File Server is the base foundation of the macro idea.

We self-funded Egnyte for almost two years and only recently, decided to raise our first round that we closed a couple of months back.

SUB: Who do you see as your competition?

Vineet Jain: On the surface, this market appears quite crowded.  One end of the spectrum you have a lot of consumer oriented solutions.  Frankly, some of them are features on Egnyte.  On the other end of the spectrum are enterprise class solutions like Sharepoint from Microsoft, that are trying to morph down for the smaller businesses.

There are very few SMB-focused solutions from ground up.  Keep in mind that even though SMBs cannot spend the same amount as money as the large companies and also does not have the same level of IT competency, their needs in terms of security and privacy are not any different from large enterprises.  This is more true for information centric businesses.  From day one, Egnyte has focused on the SMB market paying via the subscription model.

SUB: Can you describe the underlying technology behind your product, and how it works for users?

Vineet Jain: You sign up for your file server via www.egnyte.com.  When you sign up, we provide a company-specific web address, e.g. mycompany.egnyte.com, with which you will always access your file server.  Within minutes, we provision this for you and your can start setting up users and folders.  You can optionally, download and install a small Egnyte client that maps the file server as a drive on your computer—XP, Vista, Mac and Linux—and also allows you to back up personal email and file folders.  This client, written primarily in python, is platform agnostic.

The back-end application layer is on Linux with our own RAID6 storage.  They key technologies are in providing LAN like speeds over the public Internet using a variety of caching and compression techniques, design for security in all layers—physical/network/application and to scale globally, ability to add servers at an incremental cost.

Egnyte – www.egnyte.com