EMC-Syncplicity

There certainly has been a lot of buzz around EMC's acquisition of Syncplicity,which was announced at EMC World last week. Syncplicity has been described as providing "cloud file management." I am currently at the Cranel conference, where someone described Syncplicity as a Box.net for the enterprise-meaning it's designed to have an easy-to-use interface for storing and accessing files in the cloud, but has all the security and governance you'd expect from an enterprise-level solution.

Here's a quote from Rick Devenuti, president of EMC's Information Intelligence Group (which also includes the Documentum, Captiva, and ApplicationXtender products), where Syncplicity will fall under. "In acquiring Syncplicity, we validate this concept by uniting enterprise ‘sync and share' capabilities for the cloud with governance and rigor that is synonymous with Documentum . As cloud, social and mobile dominate the way work gets done, our customers require more than simple containers for managing and sharing content."

CMS wire had a story with this quote from Syncplicity co-founder and CTO Ondrej Hrebicek on the differences between Box.net (where former EMC IIG marketing head Whitney Tidmarsh is now the general manager of Box Enterprise) and his company. From the CMS story: "Box has a web 2.0 interface, he explained. 'You have to check-in, checkout, drag and drop and so on,' he said. Syncplicity, on the other hand, is a cloud based data management platform, all of your files are consolidated in one place on the cloud. 'There’s single sign-on, instantaneous sync, security, remote wipe, end to end encryption, a policy engine, and so on…Users get all of those features without having to think about any of them at all.'"