Egnyte partners with Synology to give small businesses a hybrid cloud option

File-storage provider Egnyte needs to compete with name brands like Box and Dropbox, and one of its tactics has been to get storage hardware companies to sell Egnyte’s software. Today it announced a partnership with storage vendor Synology.

The arrangement gets to the heart of what makes Egnyte stand out: it’s support for a “hybrid cloud” setup, where companies can store some files in an on-premises data center and others in a cloud. Customers buying new Synology network-attached storage boxes can now sign up for a subscription to Egnyte’s cloud service at the same time.

Around 60 percent of Egnyte’s business comes from companies using a combination of cloud and on-premises storage, Rajesh Ram, an Egnyte cofounder and its vice president of product management, told VentureBeat in an interview. That’s the sort of business cloud-only file storage providers such as Box and Dropbox can miss out on — and yet they are both very highly valued.

Synology targets small and medium-sized businesses, as does Netgear, which also partners with Egnyte. Egnyte works with enterprise storage vendor NetApp as well.

Under this type of arrangement, the storage vendor’s channel partners can sell Egnyte alongside their hardware, and the channel partners can bring home a commission for their sales, Ram said.

The partnerships amount to just one of Egnyte’s strategies for growing large enough to eventually go public. Last month the company announced a $29.5 million funding round, which will help the company expand operations in the United States and internationally.

Egnyte, based in Mountain View, Calif., says it has more than 40,000 customers and more than 30 petabytes of data stored on the cloud. To date the company has raised $66.7 million, according to a spokesman.