V3 Technology Awards 2016: Egnyte looks to an AI future to boost product offerings

Ian McEwan, VP and general manager for EMEA, tells us about his plans for the future

Egnyte is nominated for two awards at the V3 Technology Awards 2016: Best Business Application for the Egnyte Connect service and Best Software-as-a-Service Provider.

Ahead of the event V3 chatted to Ian McEwan (pictured), VP and general manager for EMEA at Egnyte, to hear about the firm's busy year and what it has up it sleeve for 2017 and beyond.

V3: How does it feel to be nominated at the V3 Technology Awards?V3 is a great organisation with a huge presence, so being nominated in its Technology Awards this year is very exciting. Being recognised by the judges is a great validation for Egnyte, our products and our leadership. Now, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to engage with the V3 audience and showcase everything Egnyte has accomplished.

What have been some of the biggest highlights of Egnyte's year?
We actually had two significant milestones this summer. Our first was in June when we launched Egnyte Protect, our industry-first content governance solution.

We are really proud of this new solution because it gives us the ability to go beyond file sharing, providing our customers with a solution that can help them effectively manage content across many repository providers in the cloud and on-premise, enabling them to create a digital workplace that can include a number of ecosystems.

Our second milestone was in July when Egnyte was recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Sync & Share for our Egnyte Connect solution. The Gartner Magic Quadrant is one of the most highly recognised analyst reports in the world, so this served as a major validation for the company and our Egnyte Connect product.

What are some of the big challenges facing your customers that you are focusing on?
Initially our customers typically come to us with issues around creating fast, secure access to their files, internally and externally. Naturally everyone wants to move to the cloud to alleviate this problem and create mobility for their workforce, but unfortunately there are a lot of other factors that come into play - pre-existing investments in infrastructure, compliance, etc.

With our Egnyte Connect solution, which is built with a hybrid architecture, we can create an environment that solves their problems on the performance and security fronts.

The other big challenge for customers is losing control of their data. Because so much data is being created in so many different places, it becomes hard for IT to maintain visibility and properly manage their organisation's data.

With our Egnyte Protect solution we are able to provide a service that gives full visibility and centralises control over data that moves across any application, any device and any storage repository.

What are some of the main areas of focus you expect to see in 2017? Our major focus will be adding a level of artificial intelligence (AI) to our solution. We want to continue to improve on our collection of analytics on how people collaborate, what they collaborate on, the tools they collaborate with etc.

This will allow us to add more machine learning capabilities and content intelligence (AI related to content) into our solutions. We are also putting a heavy emphasis on improving our user experience and user interface. We want to make it easy for each individual to customise his/her digital workplace with their favourite apps, without compromising security or performance.

Lastly we are looking to increase our engagement with vertical solution providers. Given that a one-size-fits-all approach is not viable in the enterprise, we want to continue to build out a rich ecosystem that provides choice for our users.