Zocalo must be giving the jitters to Box, Dropbox and Huddle. It is Amazon’s new baby on the block, offering Secure Enterprise Storage Service in direct competition with established majors Dropbox and Box. Preview is on for those interested. As always Amazon is aggressive on pricing, offering 200GB storage at only $ 5 per user per month with current AWS users getting it for free and that includes 50GB per user or, on payment of $ 2 per month, 200GB. Amazon is pinning hopes on Zocalo to lure enterprise community that still relies on on-premise expensive solutions. Zocalo offers a host of features, a few of which are:
- Access from any device from anywhere at any time with easy integration of access for desktops, laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, tablets and of course smartphones with the facility of syncing files across devices.
- Collaboration and feedback are a breeze since users can ask for feedbacks and manage them effortlessly when working together on a document, with a notification feature to let authors as well as participants know of changes.
- Users can share any documents through Zocalo.
- Users benefit through centralized file hub feature of Zocalo that enables them to access their own files as well as files they are collaborating on with facility add comments or edit such documents for review.
- Zocalo integrates with Amazon WorkSpaces allowing users of the latter free access with limited storage space.
- Administrators will find it easy to integrate and manage security features.
- Zocalo does away with cost, complexity and performance kinks when it comes to document collaboration and management, which should prove to be an attractive enough lure since this is the biggest headache.
- Users can add extra space on payment of additional charges.
Box and Dropbox both had announced enterprise document sharing and collaboration features not so long ago. Dropbox had come up with Project Harmony and Box is planning an IP with $ 150 million funding from TPG in its bid to become a leader in the enterprise cloud storage segment. Zocalo is all set to beat them to the finish line with, hopefully, cheaper and better services.
However, all three are positive in their outlook since they say the market is so huge that a new competitor or two will not make much of a dent. Amazon announced Zocalo at its Summit Event in New York on 10th July.
