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Box, Citrix, Dropbox, and Egnyte represent the leaders’ section in the latest Gartner enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) Magic Quadrant.
The 2016 rankings show an interesting correlation year on year; Dropbox and Egnyte move from the challenger and visionary sections respectively, while the overall number of vendors, 13, represents a step down from 16 last year. VMware AirWatch, CTERA Networks and Acronis fall off the niche player section this year, while EMC fell off altogether – partly down to the firm’s acquisition by Dell for $67 billion (£43.7bn) in October last year.
“We’re proud to be recognised as a leader, and this recognition underscores our company vision, product innovation, and our commitment to helping drive customer success,” wrote Thomas Hansen, global vice president for revenue at Dropbox in a blog post. “We’re honoured to be recognised by Gartner as a leader in this rapidly growing and highly competitive global market.”
For Egnyte, placed in the leaders’ section, the concept is validation not just for them but for the space overall. “In today’s rapidly evolving digital workplaces, businesses need to maintain flexibility, security, and performance in dealing with their data,” said Vineet Jain, Egnyte CEO. “Hybrid solutions, like Egnyte, are unique in having an open architecture that allows businesses to customise their digital workplace, enabling secure access to their data via any storage, any applications, and any device.
“With this level of customisation and freedom, hybrid has become a popular choice for both IT and end users,” Jain added.
In June, Egnyte announced the launch of Egnyte Protect, positioning the firm away from the traditional EFSS bucket but evolving its market strategy. “We see ourselves as a content intelligence platform,” Isabelle Guis, chief marketing and strategy officer, told CloudTech. “EFSS has great benefits to be a service used by the line of business, but also be of interest to IT.
“We decided that the highest demand for now was content governance,” Guis added. “That’s what our customers were asking for, and that compliments very well our enterprise file sync and share.”
Box was considered by Gartner analysts at the top for completeness of vision, while Citrix was placed as the best for ability to execute.