The age of single vendors supplying complete enterprise software suites is over, according to Box CEO Aaron Levie.
Furthermore, the head of the cloud collaboration and storage business believes the familiar names that have dominated the enterprise market are about to be challenged by some of the biggest names in consumer tech.
In an interview with CIO, Levie argues that the growing emphasis on collaboration technology is driving a trend towards greater diversity in applications, not consolidation. Rather than tending towards single, monolithic shared workspaces which different communications and productivity tools, he argues that market trends reveal just the opposite happening.
Referring to a “decoupling of capabilities and technologies”, he suggests that businesses have over the past decade become increasingly more likely to purchase specific products from specialist vendors.
Like any good tradesman, businesses want the best in class of whatever tool they are using, plus the flexibility to build their own toolbox from scratch. Off the shelf complete packages somehow just don’t feel right.
When it comes to collaboration, the key is how well different comms, file sharing and desktop apps can be slotted together with others. Here, claims Levie, the consumer brands have an advantage. Not only are they focused on developing specialised, standalone products, they have the experience of making their products widely compatible through Open Source programming and internet hosting.
Innovation and Choice
Levie told CIO: “When you have providers of technology that focus on a specific area and build a best-of-breed technology, we just know empirically that customers get more innovation from that provider than a company that sort of has a 'Swiss Army Knife' where they put everything together into a gigantic portfolio or suite.”
