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Box hires former EMC Syncplicity chief

Box today has hired the former CEO of  EMC Syncplicity.

Jeetu Patel, the former general manager of EMC Syncplicity enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) business unit, has joined the competing company as the senior platform and chief strategy officer at Box. He will report to CEO Aaron Levie. Patel will lead Box’s platform organization while driving the strategy behind the platform business and developer relations.

The company’s corporate development organization, led by Villi Iltchev, senior vice president of corporate development, will report to Patel.

The news comes several weeks after EMC sold the Syncplicity sync-and-share business to Skyview Capital, a private investment firm based in Los Angeles that holds a portfolio of enterprise tech companies centered on mobile and networking.

EMC acquired Syncplicity in 2012, as the online file sharing market started to become popular. However, EMC decided the business was a poor fit with its overall sales model  and its storage and IT infrastructure focus. Paterl did not make the move with Syncplicity to Skyview.

Jonathan Huberman, a former EMC executive, is Syncplicty’s new CEO.

Box is a file-sharing and collaboration company and is one of the start-ups that pioneered file sync-and-share technologies. The company claims its ecosystem has grown to include 50,000 developers and serves 4.5 million billion third-party API calls per month. This past April, Box announced its Box Developer Edition that will leverage all of the company’s core enterprise-grade functionality.

The cloud computing company offers three account types to users that include Enterprise, Business and Personal. Each account type has features such as unlimited storage, custom branding and administrative controls. Applications such as Google apps, NetSuite and Salesforce can be integrated with Box.

Syncplicity, founded in 2008, competes in the same market along with Dropbox, Watchdox, Egnyte, Citrix Systems, Accellion, Ctera, Microsoft OneDrive for Business, Google Drive and other smaller vendors.

Patel held several leadership roles in EMC’s Information Intelligence Group, including chief marketing officer, chief strategy officer and chief technology officer. Prior to joining EMC, he was president of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm focused on collaboration and content management across a range of industries, including financial services, insurance, energy, manufacturing, and life sciences.

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