Reinvent or buy

Egnyte's core focus has been providing an On Demand File Server to the SMB market. Backup capability has never been our leading value proposition. Much to our surprise, we continue to get significant interest from customers who want to use Egnyte only for backup. Ease of use, easy access to backed up data online, automatic versioning of changed files and ability to search - are some of the reasons.

We, therefore, are being pulled by the market to enhance backup. I am wondering should we buy a company which has been working on backup and nothing else - doing smart de-deuping, data compression and potentially with a hadup architecture in the back, or build some of these capabilities ourselves.

Offline Access

Providing group off-line access is an interesting challenge, more complicated then single user off-line access. For example, if a file is changed in the off-line mode and someone simultaneously modifies the same file in the cloud, how to reconcile the two? Since, lock propagation to the cloud is not feasible in the off-line mode.

Egnyte today tackles this problem by creating versions of the file and sorting them on the basis of the timestamp.

This problem gets further compounded when someone with multiple remote offices uses a cloud based solution and also needs off-line access per site.

We are currently working on a solution that tries to address these issues and also overcomes issues with Microsoft DFS.