Does the Cloud let you work harder?

One observation I have made over the last year, which positively amazes me, is the work hours of our customers. The SMB customers we serve are some of the hardest working people I have ever seen.

Jeff, who runs a construction firm on the east coast sometimes calls our tech support line past midnight; Brook, who runs his clean tech company in Southern Cal, travels all over the world, working many times using his iPhone; and Sean, whose company makes really great HD accessories, replies to my emails at 2 AM EST, sounding every bit energetic in his response.

The availability of “always on” services now makes it possible to work anywhere (or everywhere!) and anytime (or all the time!). For us at Egnyte, this lends a whole new meaning to uptime and ease of access and raises the bar for what we have to do.

Our customers inspire us to do so!

Enterprise buying patterns are changing

When we started Egnyte, the target market was SMB - defined as 1-99 person companies. Within a short span, building on the initial successful adoption, we expanded that to 1-500 person companies.

For the past few months, we have been signing customers which are departments within large enterprises. For example, we recently closed a 500 seat deal. Interestingly, we never directly marketed to companies of this size, yet they found us. Seems like a confluence of three factors - better awareness of Egnyte, increasing comfort with cloud based infrastructure solutions (Egnyte On Demand File Server) and the economy - working in favor of subscription based services i.e. conversion of capex dollars to opex dollars.

Also, the local cloud solution that was launched in mid February of this year, providing the comfort of having a local copy of data for that "just in case" concern, is working well for us.