Metalogix believes demand for this will be strong in environments with many collaboration solutions, and think it will be especially strong as a partner play.
Adam Levithan, Metalogix’s Director of Product Management
Washington D.C.-based Metalogix, makes cloud management software to migrate, manage and secure content across enterprise collaboration platforms. Today at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, the company is taking that a step further with the introduction of Content.ly, a SaaS offering that allows organizations to manage content across all collaboration platforms.
“Today with the rapid uptake of cloud collaboration environments, it’s not at all uncommon for an organization to have four, five, even six approved collaboration solutions,” said Adam Levithan, Metalogix’s Director of Product Management. “Until now there hasn’t been a way to apply control to those systems without interfering with ease of use.”
Levithan walked through common use cases to illustrate that the high number of platforms claimed isn’t marketing bumf.
“If an organization uses Office 365, they are starting with two right there – SharePoint and OneDrive for Business,” he said. “But then the marketing department may well use DropBox, because it’s very good at handling large files that those departments send, and the content typically isn’t risky information. Then the sales department will use Salesforce, and consultants or departments may use something else, like Box.”
The technology being used in Content.ly is not new. Metalogix has already been using it in other products, but it is being applied here for a new purpose.
“The technology itself has been baking for a few years behind the scenes, and powering a few of our solutions,” Levithan said. “It has been out there but hasn’t been fleshed out as a separate product. It was first used in Drive2Office365, which was released almost immediately with Office 365 in 2013. This was the first seed, and all the technical things needed to run a platform would wind up being built behind it.” It has been used since in other solutions, like Sensitive Content Manager.
Content.ly provides a comprehensive set of cloud apps to manage the lifecycle of content stored and shared across multiple platforms. This includes: migration and synchronization’ data protection and restoration; sensitive content security with context-aware identification, filtering and classification; permission control, auditing and reporting; suspicious user activity detection; Data Loss Prevention; and archiving.
“Because this is a true SaaS platform, it can also go across a lot of different organization sizes, not just the enterprise,” Levithan said. “It would start with Microsoft of about 150 seats. They have the same issues as organizations with tens of thousands, but those larger ones have more risk.”
While Metalogix Content.ly will be purchased both by customers and partners, Levithan said that they expect the offering will be particularly strong for partners.
“The exact percentage between customers and partners in terms of who will buy this, we are not sure, but we think it is a strong opportunity for a lot of partners to benefit,” he stressed. “In particular we think that it will help the Microsoft Cloud Service Providers expand. But Microsoft is pushing all its partners towards cloud, so we think this will have broad applicability. Because it’s a true SaaS environment, partners who build their own applications will be able to sell them in the App Store.
Metalogix is demonstrating Content.ly at their booth (Booth 645) at the Microsoft Ignite Conference. Customer access to the program will be available at Ignite with subscription roll out happening through early 2017.
