The Transfer Files Podcast Episode 2

How to Navigate the Complex World of Secure File Transfer

Secure file transfer may be a niche technology, but its impact spans every industry. With so many tools, environments, and vendors to choose from, selecting the right data transfer solution can feel overwhelming, especially in a market that’s evolved dramatically in recent years.

In episode 2 of The Transfer Files, James and Steph break down what’s happening in the marketplace and how IT teams can cut through the noise. The discussion takes a close look at the current MFT industry, including growth forecasts, key players, and the latest Gartner Quadrant insights.

The conversation also explores the different file transfer environments available today, helping listeners understand their options and choose the best fit for their organisation. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to improve your current setup, you’ll find practical tips and expert perspective to help you move forward with confidence.

Watch the full episode below. And if you missed episode one, where we dove into the fundamentals of managed file transfer, what it is, why organisations need it, and how it helps businesses securely exchange data, you can catch up here! 

 

 

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

 

Episode Transcript 

Welcome back to The Transfer Files, the podcast where we talk all things file transfer, security, supply chain, automation and more. My name is Steph Johnson, and in today's episode, I'll be sitting down with James Lewis to understand more about the marketplace and what solutions are out there. Whether you are just starting your journey of implementing an MFT system, or perhaps considering a migration, this episode is for you. Enjoy!

James, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Great to be back.

I know. How are you?

How am I? Tired today. I'm not going to lie. Went for a run last night. I'm feeling it today. So I hope I'm on point.

We had episode one. We're officially podcasters.

Apparently so. Apparently so. Need to see those viewing figures.

Now I won't waste any time in getting into today's subject, which obviously is understanding from your perspective a little bit more about the marketplace and what's out there for organisations to consider.

Sure.

In the time that I have been in the world of file transfer, which is not as long as obviously yourself, you've had years in this space, so you are the expert.

Thank you.

But at Protocol, a big part of what we do is help organisations find the ideal solution. And what we do feels incredibly niche. Yet there does feel like there's a lot of options out there to consider. Do you agree?

Yes, I do agree that we're incredibly niche and that's through design. So we're in a unique position of being pretty much the number one consultancy globally when it comes to managed file transfer, which is a nice position to be in. And yes, thank you, I have been in this industry for quite some time, as we might have covered in the previous episode. I guess, yeah, there are a lot of players, and we're gonna really dive into that over the coming sort of 15, 20 minutes. I think the key thing really is for somebody that's on this journey is to really think about what it is that they're after. So what we find is a lot of organisations when they go down this path, and I guess this is the shameless plug for us, we're an independent consultancy, we work with lots of different products. It's like going out to buy a car. You go to BMW, they're gonna say the BMW is the best car in the world. I mean, it's not, but that's by the bite. And we're in that position of independence where we can recommend a BMW, it might be Mercedes or it could be a Skoda.

And has it always been, I mean, 20 years or so Pro2col's been going, 21 now. Has it always been a case of there's always been lots of players or has it been in recent years that there's been a lot more players come to market? Has it always been that way or have you seen quite a considerable amount of change?

There's several ways of answering that question. Marketplace consolidation, absolutely. Lots of vendors have been acquired and we'll look at some of those vendors shortly. And it's the same with any technology space, so lots of software vendors are acquired for one reason or another. So there has been consolidation, less vendors in the space. I think what's also changed is the infrastructure has changed over last 20 years, a lot more emphasis on cloud. So there's newer types of opportunities for moving data around. And conversely, where the infrastructure wasn't in place and a different security posture was accepted, lesser solutions were considered to be appropriate where nowadays they certainly wouldn't be.

Interesting. I wonder if we can go into a little bit more detail about that before we talk to sort of the key players in the industry. You mentioned the cloud set up there. How many different setups can you have? Obviously, one I hear a lot is on-prem. Cloud, hybrid seems to be popular these days. I wonder if you can expand on those and if there's anything else?

Yeah, okay. So, let's start as far back as we can. So, on-premises deployment would have typically been in somebody's office or even in their data centre, but now that's now called a private data centre. So, it could be also deemed a private cloud. There are cloud deployments, so it could be again, as I just said, in your private data centre, or it could be in a public data centre like an Amazon or a Microsoft Azure, or Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, lots of different hosting options for solutions. Many organisations now have sort of been on a journey to the cloud, but still have some on-premises deployments of stuff. So they need to move data between them. They may have workflow processes and data movement processes internal to their on-premises infrastructure, but also building out alternative platforms and processes in the cloud as well. So that would be a hybrid. And then you may well have organisations that are entirely happy with going SaaS or cloud first. And we have some platforms that we represent that are SaaS and cloud first.

And it's just a complete mix. There's not one deployment that's favoured over the other. It comes back to that point around it's up to a business's use case and what they need.

It's exactly that, yeah.

Interesting. What I have in front of me is a chart and it features on our website and in a couple of our guides, but it talks around how MFT is a growing market. And it doesn't look like it's slowing down by all means, but it's predicting the global spend on MFT technologies to exceed, gosh, billions, like three billion by 2030, which I think is a 60 % increase from where we are now. Do you think it's going to just keep going? It's not slowing down?

Well, so for the discerning viewer, for the CIOs out there, we'll look at that graph and they will go, don't see it. And to a certain extent, I would agree. So, and I say that from the point of view of, and we've referenced it in some of our collateral and on our website, showing that the marketplace is increasing in spend. And it is for one reason. And that's where organisations are identifying the fact that, you know, securing their infrastructure, securing the supply chain, securing the movement of data is increasingly important. Therefore, the spend is going up. I'm not entirely sure that the organisation, the research organisation behind that necessarily understands that because they write these and sell these reports. So quite a significant investment being the cynical person that I am. for the CIOs out there, I wouldn't go spending $7,000 on the report. I can tell you that spend is going up, but that's relative to the importance of the solution rather than the growth of the industry, so to speak.

Interesting. So in terms of MFT technologies, I think it would be a good time to talk about some key players in the market. Now, again, there is another piece of content that we've shared, albeit it is probably quite out of date, and you'll be able to shed some more light on that. But the Gartner research piece, they brought out a quadrant that represents where all the MFT technologies sit. And I am wondering whether that represents a good picture of where we are today or whether things have changed, whether there's, and I imagine there has been mergers and acquisitions and some technologies may not even exist anymore.

All of the above. All of the above. So that original matrix was put together by a guy I know pretty well, a guy called Frank Kenny. He left Gartner after writing this and went to a number of other different organisations. Great guy, larger than life. The matrix that he put together for Gartner back in 2008, 2009.

It was 2009.

Actually, there was one before the one that we've got on the website. So the one that we've got on the website is the most recent one, not to say it's very recent. And Frank pulled together a consolidated view of the marketplace of all of the vendors that moved files around at that moment in time. Now, the functionality that you would define managed file transfer by now, you couldn't put all of those vendors from 2009 into that mix. They just wouldn't exist. They wouldn't have the functionality to achieve it. Additional to that, a good number of them don't exist anymore. Repliweb has gone, Newbridges has gone, GroupLogic's gone, CyberArk has gone as well, and others. And a number of them are also more aligned with, and we talked about this on the last podcast, WeTransfer. So they ad hoc, person to person, file sharing. So if you look on that list, you've got the likes of Bizcom are in there. And I think Leapfile is another one that is more ad hoc centric, person to person. So it's very much out of date.

I was going to say you're missing some as well. I can't see the likes of GoAnywhere on here or Coviant. There's definitely some missing.

So at that moment in time, it might not even be listed, but Linoma were the vendor that wrote GoAnywhere initially, which was then acquired by HelpSystems, which also acquired Globalscape and now goes under the brand of Fortra. So they're one of the bigger players in the market. But a lot of those organisations on that matrix just don't exist. They've been swallowed up by larger organisations. So you'll see Ipswitch on there. It's now owned by Progress and lots of other variations within that. It's a historical view of the marketplace. It's not relevant for today.

No. And obviously Gartner have not updated it since 2009. So I know it's something that we take into our own hands and attempt to, as leading experts, position this.

Yeah, we spent some time. I'm not entirely sure you even know this, but we were a Gartner partner for a while. And I spoke with three analysts who look after the MFT marketplace and help them to understand where the market currently is. Their analysts now look at a broader set of integration technologies, including iPaaS and things like that, which are a bit more modern, a bit more interesting. And so I was able to give them a better insight in the marketplace as it currently stands.

Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's definitely a crowded marketplace. So my next question is really someone completely new to this space could easily, they could easily get lost in. There are a lot of solutions and they all look like they do exactly the same thing. What should someone who is looking to implement an MFT solution be considering or looking at and what's the priority when it comes to narrowing down the best solution for them?

Again, a lot of answers to that question. So there's a functional set of requirements and we dived into that a little bit in the last episode. Functionality is broadly the same. I'm going to come back to the BMW analogy with used cars. They are all similar to cars, i.e. they all have four wheels, have steering wheel, they have rear view mirror, all the same constituent parts. They do the same thing. They're all the same type of solutions. Now, how they operate and what they look like and some of the functionality around the edges are some of the things that will define which car you were to choose or which MFT solution you choose. You might also make a choice depending upon how the product is evolving. So what's its roadmap? What's its release cadence on the software? How many CVs has got, i.e. does it have lots of vulnerabilities being reported on a regular basis? All of these sorts of things can go into the roadmap, but we typically, when we're looking at this, would look at things like support and how well that's being delivered by the vendor. And we obviously deliver a lot of support to our end customers. Probably approaching 90 % of our support cases we'll deal with directly without involving the vendor. But when you do need to involve the vendor, you need to know that they've got your back or they are competent. And that's when it's easy for us to understand whether a vendor is a good choice or a bad choice. So we take all those things into consideration. Other things to think about for people that don't approach us and aren't interested in engaging us, but are around the world. There are regionalised solutions as well. So, if you're in Japan, you are using Saison Systems product called Holt. It pretty much dominates the market. If you are in the DACH region, so Germany, Australia, Switzerland, it's Seeburger. If you're in Italy, it's Premier. So, it depends and you could argue also Axway in France. So, some of them are global organisations, some of them are very much more regionalised. And we know that in some regions they very much like to support the local technology and it's supported locally as well. So lots of different things to consider.

Lots of different things to consider. And you touched very briefly on roadmaps. I was just wondering if you see and if you've seen in your experience at Pro2col and beyond, whether you have someone using a particular product that the solution doesn't have the most exciting roadmap but it's a case of it's always worked for them, it transfers the number of files that they need to, it's a case of if it's not broken, don't fix it kind of thing versus someone that finds a solution and then takes that solution and it is the focus of their then entire infrastructure and supply chain kind of thing, it's the sole focus. Do you see a mix of that where people don't care as long as it does the job or? 

It depends upon the organisation and the use case. So it could well be that their supply chain requirements, their movement of data is relatively basic. And if that's the case, you know, that you don't need to necessarily invest significant and vast amounts of money. It's always worthwhile considering, I guess, at that point, what the future might look like. And we always when we're talking to customers, we always talk about, you know, don't look to solve the tactical problem now. Look at what the strategic direction of your business is and making sure that you can try to address that. So coming back to the point about the organisation that has a lot of touch points, there are some obvious more enterprise ready solutions in the marketplace that you would naturally position as the right sort of technology to be able to support a big organisation that has the need to be highly available and can't afford downtime and really needs the best of the best, I guess.

Interesting. I do feel like file transfer from what I see is definitely being seen more of a strategic asset than, as you say, installing it as a tactical fix, as a checkbox kind of thing, which is interesting. What trends are you seeing in the market right now? And I'm not talking product trends, not solution trends, what's going on with each one, because I feel like we could be here for quite some time, dissecting each product. But in terms of the broader market, what are you seeing there?

So we'll continue to see consolidation. I speak to vendors at quite a senior level and I hear stories and I hear that things are evolving. Only in fact, actually, one of the vendors that we're working with currently, I think in the last 18 months, two years, they've acquired five companies to increase their market share. So that's always going to, it's always going to continue to evolve and vendors will be bought to take some of their technology for a bigger platform, which will take them out of the marketplace effectively. Things like AI are going to continue to drive sort of conversations, how AI, in fact, I've got an email in my inbox this morning from the CEO of one of these organisations that is looking at how they can deliver AI around their platform. It's quite an interesting position. Other things, organisations are now auditing, using this technology to audit their supply chain and by that I mean they are looking at how people are connecting to them with what it is that they're connecting and making a decision as to whether that's secure enough or not. So I don't think an organisation can operate as an island these days and they need to be really conscious and cognisant of the fact that if their suppliers aren't secure, then fundamentally they're not secure as well. So there's going to be a reach and creep into to making sure your supply chains secure, too.

And I'm looking forward to the episode that we have on the on the supply chain that we have got that factored in to film. So that will be exciting to talk in more detail about that with you and the AI point I feel like AI is just such a hot topic right now in every single industry in every single space.

Can't get away from it. Can you?

No, I'm slightly nervous for the future.

Ah we'll be fine. 

Got to get on the AI train otherwise you'll get left behind. 

This is true.

Someone who's on their journey looking to implement their first MFT solution, but also consider someone that might be looking to move away after watching this or they've already thinking about this, moving away from their current solution because it's just not delivering what they need it to do for their use case. What would you recommend the first steps be?

They've got to start with their requirements. Requirements planning are absolutely crucial to determining whether the product that you select now fixes the now problem, but they've also got to consider in the requirements planning what they think the future requirements may well be. And that's going to be something that CIOs of this world will know what their future strategy for the business is taking them. So they need to be able to think about what changes might be coming down the pipe in terms of probably infrastructure or security that they want to factor into the decision-making process. And it may well be that they don't need to buy all of that capability at day one, but they do need to make sure that they choose on day one, the product that's going to fit them at day end of five years. And it's mapped along with their strategy. It's just about making sure they've got requirements right.

Yeah. And you can do things like you can look at demoing products and you can test them, test, them a test drive, maybe BMW analogy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You can take out a Porsche and a Ferrari, I guess that's your thing as well. I mean, and I guess shameless plug again, but I mean, the point of us really is that rather than a CIO or an enterprise architect or whomever is responsible for a project, rather than going to BMW, Mercedes and wherever else and receiving a sales pitch from that company, because that's all they can sell, they can come to us and we can give them a broad view of the marketplace. That's a shameless plug. Sorry.

You're very good at those.

No comment.

Wonderful. I mean, yeah, it really comes back to there's probably no point in looking at every single solution out there until you know exactly your business use case and what you need that solution to do and then start considering the solutions.

And we're working on a use case documents at the minute. And so it's it's about understanding not just the silo tactical problem you're looking to fix today, but MFT solutions address every single business function and the movement of data for them. So whether it's HR data or payroll data or it could be marketing large files, it could be stuff from legal, it could be stuff from IT and database data, it could be all sorts of bits and pieces. It's about if you're investing in a solution that's going to cost X thousands of pounds, it's about making sure you get the best value out of it. And what we tend to find is organisations look to fix the tactical solution, the problem that they've got but then start to migrate some of the existing business processes and file transfers into this platform, turning it effectively into a more strategic solution over time. That's my advice. Keep looking at how you can get the best value out of your solution.

Yeah, definitely. That's great advice. I think there's some great learnings and some key takeaways there, which are going to be so useful. And yeah, thank you for episode two.

Yeah, look forward to seeing you in episode three.

And thank you very much to our listeners for tuning in today. We hope you found today's session valuable. If you'd like to have a chat with our team around your existing MFT setup or are on that journey to implementing a solution, we'd love to hear from you and we'll make sure to leave our contact details below. Please do subscribe and we will see you in the next episode. Thank you.