Egnyte, a cloud storage and collaboration company, signed a multimillion-dollar, multiyear deal with the Microsoft Azure cloud — because Microsoft is "the best partner there is," said Egnyte's CEO and cofounder, Vineet Jain.
Under the partnership, announced Thursday, Egnyte — a rival to Box and Dropbox for business customers — will move many services to the Microsoft Azure cloud, and Egnyte and Microsoft will come up with joint product strategies.
Jain said this partnership was a good fit because most Egnyte customers already use Microsoft Office, which Egnyte integrates with.
"I find that Microsoft, from an enterprise focus — which is what we're all about — is probably the best partner there is," Jain told Business Insider. "We both win by providing one integrated solution. We are very bullish about what the potential of Egnyte and Microsoft could be, and it's off to a good start."
Essentially, Egnyte helps customers choose where they want to store their files, whether in the cloud or their servers. Once those files are stored, Egnyte offers security and access controls that can be appealing to the IT department.
Egnyte still helps customers store data in other clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Though Microsoft is in second place in the broader market, behind AWS, Jain said he recommends Azure to customers as Egnyte's preferred cloud storage system.
"We're not seeing that level of integration or go-to-market programs put together by Amazon," Jain said. "Microsoft is much hungrier. They really want to bridge the gap between them and Amazon."
Egnyte had been centered on Google Cloud and even took investment capital from GV back when it was still known as Google Ventures. But two years ago, Egnyte switched its focus to Azure as a storage partner because it is "dominant in the enterprise," Jain said, adding that Microsoft helps customers in not just selling cloud services but migrating to the cloud.
What's more, Jain said, Egnyte liked that Microsoft provides a hybrid cloud service, where companies keep some of their data on their own servers and some in the public cloud. Many companies still need to keep some of their workloads on data centers because of regulatory concerns.
Google Cloud and AWS have also announced hybrid cloud services, but they are not widely available, making Microsoft the de facto leader in the space.
In October, Egnyte raised $75 million from Goldman Sachs.
