Eric van Miltenburg is YouSendIt’s senior vice president of business development
YouSendIt is one of the most mature cloud-based file share and sync services on the market today, and Business Cloud News recently had the chance to sit down with Eric van Miltenburg, the company’s senior vice president of business development to chat about the future of share and sync, enterprise IT and the cloud.
As the name suggests, YouSendIt helps users share large files with one another. The company launched its cloud-based file sharing service in 2004, when there were still significant challenges associated with sharing sizeable files with friends and colleagues. Users upload their file to the cloud and send a link to the recipient that allows him or her to download the file at reasonably high speeds.
Speaking with van Miltenburg, one gets a sense of the extent to which the core of the YouSendIt service remains relevant in enterprises today. “You think this would have changed but there’s still a pain point that exists in companies, where if you have a file that’s over 100MB, getting it from me to you in an easy way is still a challenge,” Miltenburg says.
Sharing large files has become easier for consumers and enterprise users over the years with the introduction of a range of cloud-based file sync & share services, of which there are too many to name here, but he makes a good point nonetheless.
Miltenburg says that YouSendIt is not trying to be “the system of record or common repository for everyone’s files,” and that seems to resonate with the company’s customers. One could argue that the service’s simplicity is what led the company to accumulate over 42 million users during the better part of the last decade. The company turned over $57m in revenue in 2012, a 40 per cent increase on the year before, and the company’s services are used by about 98 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies and a much larger number of SMBs.
YouSendIt has over the years gradually added syncing capabilities, organised cloud-based storage, content collaboration, e-signing and the like, capabilities that have come to attract larger enterprises in a range of sectors including the likes of Nike, Ping, and Ryder among others.
“Still, simplicity’s the name of the game, and our Outlook plugin speaks to that,” Miltenburg says. The company has developed a plugin that determines whether a file will be sent over email or using the YouSendIt service based on its size, making the whole process more immediate and familiar for users working on the popular enterprise email platform. “We’ve added these services for enterprises and wrapped around it things like enhanced levels of reporting, encryption, integration with ActiveDirectory – in other words giving the enterprise IT professional what they need to feel secure about having their corporate information on the cloud.”
Miltenburg’s point on security is important, and it’s clearly something businesses are wary of when considering a move to the cloud. A recent study commissioned by Microsoft confirmed that 56 per cent of small and medium sized businesses cited security and privacy as the primary reasons inhibiting cloud adoption for even the most basic services. But is security in the cloud simply a matter of perception, and how can enterprises embrace users sneaking these services in through the back door?
“I think that’s a good point – it really depends on what the company wants to use the services for. Certainly in far more regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, government, I see a slower adoption of the cloud,” Miltenburg says. “It’s not like they’re not adopting cloud at all. They’re just more cautious. They’re getting increasing pressure from their individual users to get access to this type of service,” he says. It’s a classic consumerisation of IT meets shadow IT story.
“In the marketing department or in dev groups, we often see lines of businesses that are happy to be a bit more regulated, whereas some of the front office stuff it’s just not the same. But over time I think we’ll get to a place where people will get to the level of comfort they need in order to use services like ours,” he says.
Whether enterprises choose to reject or move with the increasing trend towards bring your own application, the challenge for users sneaking their cloud services into the office is knowing where all of their information sits across the range of services they already subscribe to – and the challenge for enterprises is ensuring corporate data remains secure.
“That’s why we acquired Found earlier this year, a company that over the past several years has developed the technology to perform cross cloud searches in real time by normalising and indexing the data from each service provider – so everything that you send to Box, to Evernote, to GoogleDrive can be searched” Miltenburg says. “And the data is encrypted both at rest and in transit,” he says.
In this sense, YouSendIt is quite unique from other share & sync cloud services out there. With the capabilities enabled through Found, YouSendIt will be able to transcend other services. “We very much believe in a future that is cloud agnostic, whether people like it or not. We just don’t think there’s going to be a scenario where individuals and especially companies are going to be standardising on one and only one cloud service or platform,” he says. “This should be a hint as to where we see our strategy heading, and by Q3 we’ll have the Found services ported from our Mac application into the cloud so it can be accessed everywhere.”
