AWS recently released Zocalo.
“Fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service
with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user
productivity.
Users can comment on files, send them to others for feedback,
and upload new versions without having to resort to emailing multiple versions
of their files as attachments. Users can take advantage of these capabilities
wherever they are, using the device of their choice, including PCs, Macs, and
tablets. Amazon Zocalo offers IT administrators the option of integrating with
existing corporate directories, flexible sharing policies, audit logs, and
control of the location where data is stored.
Customers can get started using Amazon Zocalo with a 30-day free
trial providing 200 GB of storage per user for up to 50 users”.
But who cares?
Well for starters, Dropbox, Box,
Accelion, Huddle, Soonr, SugarSync, Google, Microsoft and Egnyte. With Apple, AWS, Google and Microsoft now
jumping into the fray of share, sync, and collaboration, the limbo music is
starting to play. AWS fired the latest
shot below the water line with Zocalo pricing
starting at $5 per user per month for 200GB of storage. Today, Dropbox charges
twice that for half as much storage.
As they have demonstrated with compute,
network and storage, when AWS competes, disruption and commoditization soon
follow.
But Dropbox et all are not going to
be throwing in their nearly $1.5B in cumulative funding towel any time in the
near future.
Why? Because simplicity and focus always win.
Box and Dropbox have made it extraordinarily simple for people to use cloud-based
storage and become untethered from earthly storage persistence. They have focused on simplifying the user
experience, usability, and economic consumption models of their products for
enterprise-IT. In many cases, as with security and enterprise integration e.g.
LDAP, ACL’s, SSO, SharePoint, Salesforce etc., Box and Dropbox have done a
great job in removing complexity.
AWS will succeed in one thing and that’s elongating sales cycles. POC’s, user trials, and price comparisons
will become the norm for all the players.
A real market. Longer sales
cycles is not what Box needs right now. The company’s line item for sales and marketing expenses expanded
from $99.2 million for the year ending January 2013, to $171 million
for the year ending January 31, 2014. This represents a majority of
Box’s $100 million increase in operating costs during the same period.
Zocalo will resonate with
developers accustom to AWS. Much like
Hipchat and Fuze are used in the bowels of engineering, yet the superior
quality of experience of Webex, Go-to-Meeting, and Telepresence still rule. AWS’s offerings
are bountiful and confusing. The
plethora of services AWS has on the price book, are overwhelming. At the same
time, there is very little cross-sell between the core strength positions of S3,
EC2, and Zocalo. AWS has not
exactly demonstrated strength in moving up the stack to LOB or
verticalizations.
Bottom-line, Zocalo will create sales
chaff for the real-enterprise share/collaboration market and be a niche product,
relegated to IT-infrastructure with minimal core AWS attach rate.
