The cloud is the hottest club in town -- everyone wants in, but doesn't know until their in if its everything they wanted. Thankfully, cloud storage and collaboration businesses have been using all the customer feedback to build better tools for the virtual environment. The latest company beefing up its tool belt is YouSendIt.
The new product YouSendIt is debuting Tuesday is Workstream: a file sharing platform for enterprising businesses that offers deeper integration with Microsoft SharePoint and ups the security when sharing content beyond the firewall and across mobile devices and desktops.
YouSendIt is one of the file-sharing bigwigs that helps businesses send large files that otherwise bottleneck or wouldn't be allowed through the Microsoft Exchange system.
This new Workstream product integrates with the Microsoft Active Directory as well as Outlook to make, accessing, adjusting and sharing content between customers easy and secure whether the members of the file are inside or outside the company firewall. The company also added the functionality of a SharePoint plug-in to securely share files externally straight from SharePoint.
The file sharing platform can be accessed from the iPhone, iPad, Android, desktop (on Mac and Windows) and the Web. Workstream also enforces encryption on mobile devices and provides policies such as mobile application passcode enforcement and remote wipe of application data.
Currently, the Campbell-Calif.-based YouSendIt has 28 million registered users worldwide, including AMAG Pharmaceuticals, Burr & Forman, CHI & Partners, Sesame Workshop and Woods Bagot.
It is no longer logical to believe that the workplace can be the only place to access work data -- at least not now that technology allows for so much more flexibility and mobility, and this new product facilitates that mentality.
YouSendIt has received more than $53 million of venture funding from the likes of Adams Street Partners, Alloy Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, Sevin Rosen Funds and Sigma Partners.
The cloud storage, sending and editing world is getting a lot of funding right now. Just a few months back, Dropbox announced a hefty Series B $250 million round of financing. The lead investor on the fund was Index Ventures, with Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners also investing.
Dropbox, which is estimated to be worth $4 billion, has over 45 million users and saves 1 billion files every three days.
And just a few days ago, Dropbox spent and undisclosed amount to beef up its roster of talent by acquiring an online collaboration and communication tool (and its leadership) Cove.
The engineering team in charge of Cove, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, as well as Akhil Wable and Joshua Jenkins will join the cloud-sharing company Dropbox immediately. Agarwal and Sanghvi were both well-respected members of the Facebook family from 2005 to 2010 and Sanghvi recently received a TechFellow award for her contribution engineering efforts.
Another competitor, Box.net secured the final round in a total $162 million fund on October 11.
While the cloud-world seems lousy with money, there is plenty of work to go around -- for now. The real interesting action will come once most big businesses have established ties with cloud companies and the file-sharing businesses have to start attracting companies away from one another.
