Cloud collaboration firm Egnyte has updated its platform with Google Drive integration, allowing its enterprise customers to see and access shared documents stored on Google accounts alongside shared files stored on Egnyte, and enabling better collaboration.

Egnyte’s platform is styled as an “enterprise Dropbox”, but actually combines on-premise storage with cloud-hosted storage to enable sharing across remote sites or access by mobile users, all under control of policies set by the IT department.

Rajesh Ram, vice president of products at Egnyte, told V3 that the firm has considerable traction in industries such as CAD and engineering, where there is a need to store very large files locally, but share them across multiple sites by synchronising via the cloud.

However, at the same time, customers are using multiple collaboration platforms for different purposes, and Google seems to be emerging as the leader for document sharing.

“As the cloud is becoming more mainstream, businesses are using different solutions to meet different needs. When you have to work on a project and you have to create a spreadsheet or a list that you collaboratively edit with a group of colleagues, Google Docs has pretty much become the standard for that,” Ram said.

“What we’ve tried to do is bring these worlds together and integrate all of it under one roof, so the end user can have Google Docs, CAD drawings, media files, all residing side by side and they can access them anywhere,” he added.

The integration comes at the back end, using Google application programming interfaces (APIs) to link Egnyte’s cloud to Google Drive. Customers will typically link their Egnyte account with a corporate Google Docs account, after which they can access both with a single sign-on.

Egnyte unveiled the Hybrid Cloud version of its platform last year. The current update is available at no extra cost to existing customers, the firm said.