I’ve been saying in recent weeks that file syncing is hot. Dropbox reportedly declined a $600 million acquisition offer from Apple, and Box is rumored to have declined an offer of over $500 million. Dropbox is now considered the 6th most valuable startup and Box is still raising gobs of capital. Meanwhile, other companies like Egnyte and SugarSync are making their mark.

And today, ShareFile, which competes with Box and Egnyte in the enterprise file sync market, was acquired by Citrix. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I imagine Citrix paid much less than $500 million.

ShareFile provides syncronization between users’ desktops and mobile devices. It doesn’t appear to offer the shared sync folder option that Box, Dropbox and Egntye have, nor does it have the server syncing functionality that Egntye offers. According to Citrix the acquisition will enable the company to:

• Make common data services like search, share, sync, secure, authenticate, open and preview available to a wide range of applications, services and use cases through a set of open APIs.
• Extend secure data sharing services to new and existing apps, stored in public and private clouds, and accessed from millions of different business and consumer devices.
• Connect data seamlessly into the way people collaborate today, ensuring that the right documents and files are always accessible when needed, and always up to date.

ShareFile will fit into Citrix’s Personal Cloud Umbrella, which includes Citrix Receiver, GoToMeeting and GoToManage.

Services Angle

As I’ve said before, sync is a non-trivial computing problem and it’s not easy to get right. This is one area that it makes sense to acquire rather than try to build in-house. As companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft compete in cloud storage, expect more sync companies to be snapped-up.