Business has been booming at enterprise Sync and Share vendor Syncplicity since they were spun out of EMC last year. Now they are unveiling a new content migration tool to simplify and automate migrations to their platform, and which the customer can also license to maintain permanent birectional access.

Enterprise sync and share vendor Syncplicity has announced the availability of a new tool designed to replace in-house projects by customers who are migrating their files to the Syncplicity platform.

The Santa Clara-based vendor, which was spun out of EMC last July (having been earlier acquired by it in 2012) has been using its independence to make strong strides since then.

“The challenge Syncplicity faced as a wholly owned entity, was that within EMC we were stuck within the Documentum Group,” said Jonathan Huberman, Syncplicity’s CEO. “We were a software group, within a software group, within a mainly hardware-focused company. Syncplicity wasn’t getting the attention it needed.”

Huberman stated that while EMC still has a financial interest in the company – and are one of its key channels to market – since the spinout, business has really flourished.

“We became a separate company on July 15, 2015, and in the second half of 2015, we did more than double the bookings of the first half,” he said. “In Q1 2016, we did 1.5 times the bookings we did in all of 2015.”

While the Sync and Share market also has strong consumer and SMB elements, Syncplicity plays in the enterprise space.

“The enterprise market has three big players – us, who are focused on larger enterprises, Citrix with ShareFile, which was SMB-focused when they acquired it and which they have been moving into the enterprise, and Box. The differentiation in this market is between cloud-only, where Box leads, and hybrid, where we lead. With hybrid, the data is stored where the client wants it, and in any cloud they prefer, and that’s an advantage in the enterprise.”

Syncplicity sells through what Huberman called a channel-assisted model.

“Our salespeople are involved in any major sale, but we are almost always brought in through channel partners,” he said. He emphasized that this is because of the nature of how they sell – to the C level – contrasting with the model of the cloud vendors, which uses a freemium model to get a foothold in a company, and then try and move upwards.

“We go right to the C-levels, telling them about their data leakage problem,” Huberman said. “Before Syncplicity, when I ran Tiburon, all my salespeople there had a Dropbox account, and I knew when they left the company, they would take all our data with them and I couldn’t stop them. Now with this, the organization can have the security of knowing that when people leave, data doesn’t go with them. It’s a powerful argument to make to a CISO. But as a relatively small company, it can be hard to get to talk to them, so we rely on the partner to make introductions.”

Syncplicity’s channel is its partners, and their partners in turn. These presently include EMC, CDW, AT&T and Ricoh. Another new one is being announced on May 2, at EMC World. Another large one is being signed now, and is to be announced next month.

“In Canada, we don’t yet have a distinct channel strategy, but it is something we are starting to think about, and that is among our next steps,” Huberman said.

Huberman said the idea for the new tool, Syncplicity Data Hub, came from a customer engagement. The goal was to link all the legacy data sources and simplify the process of file migration from those sources to Syncplicity’s platform.

“Siemens used our APIs to do this themselves, for their 330,000 employees, reducing cost to less than 1/12 what it had been before, while getting access to all the data, including unstructured data that had been in siloes,” he said. “We saw how they did this, but not everyone has 15,000 IT people like them, so we needed a tool which would do this on a broad scale for all our customers.”

Syncplicity Data Hub connects to over 30 data sources, including legacy file shares, SharePoint and all major enterprise content management (ECM) systems. It then automates the process of file migration from these systems to the Syncplicity platform.

The tool is easily deployed and configured to migrate, copy and synchronize files rapidly, even when petabytes of data are involved. Integrity of folder structures, metadata, permissions and document versions is preserved so employees have anywhere, anytime desktop and mobile access to all their documents.

“Before we developed this, customers would do these as one-off projects, with our assistance,” Huberman said. “Now the whole process is automated.”

Syncplicity Data Hub is acquired as part of the licensing for the overall sale. Its licensing has two versions. For a simple one-off migration, it’s free within the basic license cost. If, however, the customer wants to retain permanent bidirectional access into and out of data stores, an upgraded seat license at additional cost is available for that.