In another strategic alliance deal, Egnyte, an enterprise file-sharing and collaboration provider,  has partnered with Microsoft to make Azure cloud platform the preferred storage choice for its customers. However, a company statement says that if a customer already has a license with a different cloud provider such as Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, IBM, or Google Cloud, Egnyte will  still honor these licenses.

With this deal, users can open any Egnyte file directly on Microsoft Office Online for viewing and editing, and the changes are automatically saved back to Egnyte. Also, users can remotely edit and access Egnyte files from any native Office Mobile app.  With this option, Egnyte  plans to offer end-to-end integration services for its corporate customers to help them tackle a growing mix of documents, apps, images, and other data that are stored in employees’ personal devices.

Currently, younger employees prefer to bring their own devices for work, and tend to use the apps they feel most comfortable with. Though this flexibility is good for employees, it makes life harder for IT managers, as they have to stay on top of security and integration aspects for these different devices. Though some companies prefer to block users from bringing their own devices, it’s not seen as a viable option. Instead, many companies are turning to file synchronization and sharing providers like Egnyte, Dropbox, and Box to address this problem.

In fact, a research by Gartner shows that corporate customers tend to turn to companies that specialize in file synchronization and sharing, rather than using content management and storage tools offered by larger providers like Microsoft and Google. However, the downside with choosing smaller companies is that they focus only on a niche area, and this means, clients still have to turn to larger vendors for integrations.

To overcome this downside, many file sharing and cloud storage companies are collaborating with cloud vendors to offer a comprehensive service. Already, Dropbox has partnered with Hewlett-Packard, and Box teamed up with IBM to offer cloud storage services. Hence, it’s no surprise that Egnyte also chose this path, to stay on top of competition.

Also, Microsoft was a natural partner for Egnyte, as the two companies have been tapping into each other’s capabilities for more than a year now. In mid-2015, Egnyte and Microsoft entered into an agreement under which, business users can seamlessly access and manage all of their Windows files over a network. This partnership was a big success for both the companies, especially Egnyte, as it helped to expand the latter’s customer base.

Since then, both the companies have developed many integrations such as Azure Key Vault, Azure AD, Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft Sharepoint Online, and these tools have been beneficial for both the companies to reach out to a wider customer base and to take on competition in their respective segments. More importantly, users have gained immensely from these collaborations, thereby making the above agreements a win-win situation for everyone involved.

This new agreement too is expected to give Egnyte a big boost, both on the apps and IT infrastructure markets as Azure has become an important platform for enterprise integrations today.

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