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EFSS Market Contraction? Where Are We Now?

Predictions of a major decline in Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) vendors have not yet borne out. Around three or four years ago, analysts began predicting a significant decrease in the number of vendors in the burgeoning Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) space. This prediction was shared by some in the industry; for instance, in 2017, the CEO of Egnyte predicted that the casualties would be “anybody on the Gartner MQ (and any other analyst research) who is not 1) a leading vendor 2) a bigger corporation like Citrix, Microsoft and Google.” However, though Varonis’s DatAnywhere has announced it will no longer be supported or updated after February 2020, the other top vendors in the space from 2016 are still around today.

Our Take

The lack of major changes could indicate the market is mature. Alternatively, perhaps the final purpose of EFSS software has not yet been fully defined. As James Alan Miller (TechTarget) pointed out in 2018, the product itself has evolved so that, in addition to sync and share, these products now also tend to “unify communications, collaboration and content management tasks for individuals and workgroups in some manner.” This likely means that enterprises are still in the process of discovering and assessing the true value and applications of these tools, something that is supported by academic research on enterprise adoption of collaboration systems. If so, market consolidation is still an important consideration to keep in mind, as Virginia Backaitis (CMS Wire) suggested in 2018.