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Red Bull North America has chosen Egnyte as its enterprise cloud sync and share provider having replaced Box in a “huge” client win for the Mountain View firm.
One of the key draws for Red Bull was the use of Egnyte’s API to connect to the sales team’s iPads, enabling the team to work in the field as well as leveraging Egnyte’s back end storage.
The announcement represents a validation of Egnyte’s strategy going forward, with the company focused squarely on the enterprise – not indifferent to Box, it has to be said – and company expansion, opening up its European offices last year.
Ian McEwan is Egnyte head of EMEA. He notes the importance of securing Red Bull, particularly given previous relationships with other vendors.
“You’re always on the back foot,” he tells CloudTech. “From our relationships with Red Bull it was taking a slightly different tact. We started talking with them, we started to see some key use cases that we could convince them to switch from Box, from that perspective we then went into a pilot, and from thereon in it was a no-brainer for them to change over.”
The process picked up on a key concept for Egnyte; while cloud collaboration is extremely important to organisations, if users are offline, or want to access files and folders from a desktop that needs to synchronise to main storage behind the firewall without the need for a VPN, it becomes more difficult.
“I think what Red Bull, like a lot of other customers, are looking for is a better way to collaborate and a way for technologies to co-exist,” McEwan explains. “The strategy is not to just go to the cloud, it’s a matter of having the flexibility to put the data on any storage, render it through any device, anywhere, whether you’re on or offline.
“So when we start engaging with customers, particularly established [ones] who have already got existing relationships with vendors, it’s about focusing on two things; trust and understanding that we believe we can better meet their business needs, and how we are going to help them be more efficient.”
Egnyte wouldn’t divulge the exact number of employees using the system, however McEwan did note Red Bull – with an overall employee base of more than 8000 – signed up for the capabilities across the whole organisation.
It remains however an important win, with McEwan noting the transition from Box to Egnyte had gone “extremely well.”
“When you look at Red Bull versus a small organisation with two or three employees, every single customer that comes to us is very unique, and we want to keep them as long as you can,” he says. “When you look at global enterprise customers it’s about being able to work with them. When we go into customer engagements it’s about a partnership and not necessarily about a sales organisation just selling to a customer and moving on.”