Enterprises have long lived in a world where storage meant buying in bulk,preparing for possible influxes of data and signing cheques to make even the wealthiest of businesses wince.
However,with the growth of cloud computing,a shift has been occurring where rather than stockpiling terabytes of hard drives"just in case",a more flexible option of utilising other people's datacentres on demand and paying only for what you use has emerged.
Box is one of the companies that has been driving this change.Based in California,with humble beginnings in a dorm room like many of the best Silicon Valley start-ups,its founder and CEO,Aaron Levie,has regularly been voted one of the upcoming techies to keep an eye on.
The company was founded in 2005 and has raised over$265m in venture capitalist funding,with analysts now valuing it at around$1.5bn.
However,it started as a predominantly consumer-focused business,enabling individuals to upload their files and share them with family and friends around the world.
But that world is changing and now enterprises want to get a slice of the action.
"If you think about how enterprises traditionally bought technology,it was very much a process where a CIO–or somebody at the top of your organisation–would decide what technology is going to be applicable for your entire organisation,"said Levie,in an interview with Computer Weekly.
"They will purchase it[and]spend years implementing the technology into your organisation,only to eventually find out that either the technology doesn't get used or that they need some new update to be far more relevant for how their organisation works.
"This was the paradigm that the enterprise lived off and thrived on for decades."
Yet,employees were using the likes of Box and its rivals-Dropbox,Google,Facebook etc-in their personal lives and wanting to make the change at work to use these simpler tools to boost productivity.
"What has finally happened is for the first time–in such a big way–individuals and end-users are having a much better time with their technology in their personal lives and they are now starting to bring that technology into the workplace,"said Levie.
"It is changing the demand and the needs for the enterprise and the enterprise can no longer ignore it and adopt technology that does not make all users have an amazing experience."
The CEO also claimed these circumstances put pressure on the more traditional suppliers to up their game and give better-performing technology to their customers.
"The natural trait of the technology ecosystem[is]if you are a really big company,you don't have a lot of incentive to break the status quo,"added Levie."In fact,you make the vast majority of your money on the status quo,so there isn't a lot of reasons that an enterprise software company would want to deliver cloud sharing of information if they were making billions of dollars from on-premise collaboration software."
"So finally what is happening is the demand from within the enterprise.[Suppliers]have to finally change and I think that means they are looking at what we are doing."
And that they are.From old incumbents like Oracle and HP,to the newer enterprise firms of Salesforce,it seems every technology firm wants to offer cloud storage to keep their customers signing up.But is that not frustrating for a company like Box which was doing it first?
"We aren't the only ones,they are looking at what Workday is doing,looking at what a bunch of companies are doing and realising that they have to build better software for enterprise and that is what's so exciting,"he said.
"Ultimately,enterprises are going to win because they are going to get much better technology and it is going to make them much more productive and that is a good thing for the market in general."
"They will purchase it[and]spend years implementing the technology into your organisation,only to eventually find out that either the technology doesn't get used or that they need some new update to be far more relevant for how their organisation works.
"This was the paradigm that the enterprise lived off and thrived on for decades."
Yet,employees were using the likes of Box and its rivals-Dropbox,Google,Facebook etc-in their personal lives and wanting to make the change at work to use these simpler tools to boost productivity.
"What has finally happened is for the first time–in such a big way–individuals and end-users are having a much better time with their technology in their personal lives and they are now starting to bring that technology into the workplace,"said Levie.
"It is changing the demand and the needs for the enterprise and the enterprise can no longer ignore it and adopt technology that does not make all users have an amazing experience."
The CEO also claimed these circumstances put pressure on the more traditional suppliers to up their game and give better-performing technology to their customers.
"The natural trait of the technology ecosystem[is]if you are a really big company,you don't have a lot of incentive to break the status quo,"added Levie."In fact,you make the vast majority of your money on the status quo,so there isn't a lot of reasons that an enterprise software company would want to deliver cloud sharing of information if they were making billions of dollars from on-premise collaboration software."
"So finally what is happening is the demand from within the enterprise.[Suppliers]have to finally change and I think that means they are looking at what we are doing."
And that they are.From old incumbents like Oracle and HP,to the newer enterprise firms of Salesforce,it seems every technology firm wants to offer cloud storage to keep their customers signing up.But is that not frustrating for a company like Box which was doing it first?
"We aren't the only ones,they are looking at what Workday is doing,looking at what a bunch of companies are doing and realising that they have to build better software for enterprise and that is what's so exciting,"he said.
"Ultimately,enterprises are going to win because they are going to get much better technology and it is going to make them much more productive and that is a good thing for the market in general."
