Days before enterprise file-sharing kingpin Box Inc. is due to hit the stock exchange, one of its biggest rivals is rolling out new analytics functionality as part of a deliberately timed pivot aimed at taking the competitive fight beyond collaboration. The move continues the trend of cloud service providers increasingly looking to data as a means of standing out amid mounting competition.

Egnyte Inc. sees itself as being in a particularly good position to pursue that strategy. Unlike Box and most of its other well-known rivals, the firm provides other deployment options besides a fully managed hosted environment. Organizations can run its namesake service on a major public cloud of their choice or behind the firewall, an invaluable feature when it comes to sensitive files that can’t move outside the four walls of the data center for regulatory or other reasons.

But that freedom of choice holds greater strategic value to Egnyte than merely making its platform more attractive than the competition for certain types of workloads. The firm says the ability to deploy its collaboration software across both on- and off-premise infrastructure allows customers to have single a point of management and monitoring across their entire environments as opposed to controls that are limited only to to the designated cloud-based file sharing service.

That’s a direct jab at Box, which made its own foray into analytics last September with the introduction of a native policy enforcement mechanism based on technology that leverages machine learning to group related documents based on the contents. Administrators can then set automatic policies for handling those different categories and thereby reduce the amount of manual work involved.

Egnyte is likewise targeting operations staff with its update, which introduces similar capabilities for implementing data workflows. Complementing that functionality are new analytics and reporting features that promise to provide a deeper view of how information travels throughout the environment, visibility that the company says can help enterprises tailor those workflows to more accurately meet data requirements.

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