Egnyte, the US company which provides a file-sharing platform for enterprises, is expanding in Europe with opening of European headquarters in London and plans to hire up to 100 staff in Europe over the next five years.

The move comes in response to an expanding European customer base, according to CEO Vineet Jain, who says European revenues are expected to make up 20% of the company’s total revenues by the end of this year.

EMC’s former VP of EMEA sales Mark Rattley is on board as general manager for Egnyte Europe and most immediately to company is looking to fill up to 25 sales and marketing positions to both service existing customers and grow the company’s European customer base.

Existing European customers include Kirkland, Red Bull, Mothercare and M&C Saatchi.

“Our initial team set-up is focused on direct and channel sales as well as new marketing hires. We intend to grow our professional services too as businesses do not always have the same requirements,” Jain said.

Egnyte already has a data center in Amsterdam and a 25-strong design and engineering team in Poland: “We chose Amsterdam as it was cost effective and geographically supports the whole of our European customer base from a more central location. London is a unique location because it couples the high quality IT talent with our target industries,” Jain said.

Although the company’s technology is horizontal in nature, Egnyte is targeting the financial services, advertising, hospitality and retail sectors in its push into Europe.

The company’s hybrid file-sharing models let customers securely access share and store their business files from any device at any time, no matter where the file resides, whether in the cloud or behind a firewall.

“Egnyte gives customers the choice to decide what files are kept in the cloud and which ones are kept completely behind the firewall. It unifies local and cloud storage giving IT control of where the files are being served from. Customers in highly regulated industries can keep ‘all’ their data completely on-premise and use the cloud purely as a control layer,” Jain said.