Egnyte offers up its cloudy capabilities to EMC storage boxes

Egnyte, a startup with software for storing and sharing documents in public clouds and in companies’ own data centers, has cooked up technology that lets EMC’s widely adopted storage hardware throw data up and out to the cloud.

Egnyte announced the news today after working for months with EMC engineering and product teams. Egynte has previously offered a similar product for NetApp’s storage hardware, but EMC is bigger.

The new offering, called Storage Sync for EMC’s VNX product line, could help Egnyte continue to pull in serious revenue and stay visible even as companies like Google and Microsoft buy storage infrastructure at scale and let people use it through the cloud for cheap.

And the new service can give Egnyte another way to stand out from cloud-only file-sharing services like Box and Dropbox.

“We’re saying the model is shifting. On-premise and cloud both have an equally important role to play,” Vineet Jain, chief executive and a co-founder of Egnyte, said in an interview with VentureBeat.

More generally, Egnyte wants to expand its market. No longer does it want to exclusively provide technology for syncing and sharing. It’s also eager to offer its wares to enable cross-site collaboration and replication, cloud tiering and archiving, and as a cloud file server, Jain said. That shift acknowledges the commoditization in the cloud-only file sharing business.

The offering should appeal to companies that have shelled out for EMC gear but might run into capacity issues.

Egnyte can provide to such companies an “unlimited disk in the sky,” Jain said.

And it can do so without forcing companies to buy dedicated “cloud gateway” hardware for shipping data to the cloud. It’s all software. Not that such technology isn’t interesting to EMC, which bought cloud-gateway company TwinStrata recently, or Microsoft, which bought StorSimple in 2012, for that matter.

But such products view the public cloud as a passive place to store stuff, Jain said.

“In our case,” he said, “cloud is active. It’s almost a philosophical point.”

Egnyte announced a $29.5 million round in December.