Menlo Park, California-based cloud file management provider Syncplicity has reshuffled its management team as a part of an effort to consolidate its strategy in order to better compete in a particularly crowded market.

The most notable change is the appointment of Karen White as the company’s new CEO, taking over the role of co-founder Leonard Chung, who carried Syncplicity through its launch and early growth since 2008.  Chung will stay on as the Chief Product Strategist, while co-founder Ondrej Hrebicek will continue his role as CTO.  As key innovators for Syncplicity, Chung and Hrebicek’s involvement will bey key moving forward, projecting the next steps for the company as they prepare to scale their product.  White has a strong background in the cloud services field and previously served as executive chairman for the startup.

There were three things that attracted White to her new role as Syncplicity CEO — the team, the technology and the emerging cloud market.  “The founding team I’ve known for a while now, and worked with them as an advisor and chairman, and this last step cements things,” White says.

“[Syncplicity] has an extraordinary set of talent I really respect and admire.  I think the team has been a pleasure to work with and I find them smart and insightful about where the market’s going.  They’ve created quite a culture of innovation that I like a lot.”

White’s seen a good deal of innovative startups in her day, serving as managing director at Pequot Ventures, a private equity firm with $1.8 billion under management.  There she played an early role in the investment of Scalent, a an infrastructure virtualization provider that went on to be acquired by Dell.

In addition to a new CEO, Syncplicity also hired a new marketing head and VP of finance. Jeff Schultz will serve as chief marketing officer and brings 24 years of experience to the table, while Brenda Swiney, who also has two decades of experience leading financial operations, will be in charge of the company’s fiscal activities.

Syncplicity is expanding internally, on top of fleshing out its outbound strategy.  In September it launched its first iPad app, which extends its offerings’ promise of sync and collaboration tools.  The application follows the launch of an iPhone app, and makes full use of the tablet’s functionality.

Prior to debuting its iPad app, Syncplicity launched on Salesforce, an important point of integration for the startup as it continues to expand its reach.  Sales reps can use the sync and collaboration functions that Syncplicity integrated directly with the cloud-based CRM platform to boost communications and file sharing, increasing overall productivity.

As mobility continues to play an important role in the enterprise, Syncplicity will be focusing more of its efforts on growing its partnerbase and mobile app offerings.  “I think that…the market we see is to add a layer of file management across all those different places documents are kept–in Google Docs, or Citrix or Salesforce–without the end user having to do anything,”  White explains.  “That’s our value proposition.  We’re going to surround that with a virtual private cloud without having to move files to a new place.”

contributors: Maria Deutscher