A Q&A with FileTrek CEO Dale Quayle. The Ottawa, Canada–based company was founded in 2011.
SUB: Please describe what FileTrek is, and the value proposition you bring to file management.
Quayle: FileTrek is the industry’s first combined cloud file sharing and tracking solution for the enterprise, workgroups, small businesses and individual users.
SUB: What are your target markets?
Quayle: FileTrek is scalable across hundreds of users who can work within an environment to provide security, insight and the ability to oversee the dataflow within an entire company. So, companies of any size that desire the ability to obtain a comprehensive view of all sharing, syncing, and versioning activities involving their corporate IP is FileTrek’s core market.
SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition?
Quayle: Currently we see two sets of vendors coming at this problem with different approaches: ECM—SharePoint, and File Sharing—Box.
But to manage data sprawl, companies need all three capabilities: 1) the location of a file, 2) who has access and worked on the file, and 3) how the files are related. FileTrek is the only solution that answers all three questions. If you want to truly be able to manage your data journey, you need to use FileTrek because the other companies only fulfill part of the solution.
SUB: What differentiates FileTrek from the competition?
Quayle: In actuality there are no other vendors that currently provide a combined file-sharing and data tracking solution. On one end of the spectrum, you have traditional ECM vendors with complicated document procedures that require employee adoption and a significant learning curve. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a 2nd generation of file-sharing vendors that allow employees to distribute sensitive data to a myriad of devices without providing any mechanism to track what happens to the data or where it is shared. FileTrek provides non-disruptive sharing and syncing of data for employees as well as the security and tracking controls that mangers and IT departments desire.
SUB: When was the company founded and what were the first steps you took in establishing it?
Quayle: FileTrek is a new company. However, its flagship product, FileTrek, which was also recently announced, was developed on top of the core IP of GridIron’s technology for the creative services industry to resolve their workflow management issues.
FileTrek has leveraged that heritage to build a product from the ground up to deliver the industry’s first combined cloud file sharing and tracking solution for the enterprise, workgroups, small businesses and individual users. FileTrek is the only solution to provide complete IT visibility of all sharing, syncing and versioning activities. Benefits include elimination of cloud sprawl, tracking and auditing of corporate IP, and regulatory compliance reporting.
SUB: What was the inspiration behind the idea for FileTrek? Was there an “aha” moment, or was the idea more gradual in developing?
Quayle: Simply stated—cloud sprawl. Although recent cloud computing and file-sharing applications have increased employee collaboration and contributed to workforce mobility, these tools have unwittingly created a distributed data dilemma called “cloud sprawl.”
We want to solve that problem. Critical content and corporate IP are scattered across the network, a multitude of personal devices, and public-cloud applications. FileTrek is scalable across hundreds of users who can work within an environment to provide security, insight and the ability for to oversee the dataflow within an entire company.
SUB: You recently raised $10 million in new funding. What are your plans for the funds?
Quayle: The funding will be used to support expansion of sales and marketing efforts in the U.S.
SUB: Do you plan to raise more outside funding in the near future?
Quayle: Yes, it is likely we will speak with the VC community sometime in Q3.
SUB: What are your goals for FileTrek over the next year or so?
Quayle: Now that we have launched, the company will focus energy on marketing and sales efforts. Our goal is to deploy FileTrek within the Enterprise and believe with our ability to add tracking to traditional file sharing, we expect to capture a great deal of this market.
FileTrek – www.filetrek.com
