The enterprise collaboration space is hot. Recently, cloud file-sharing company Box has started trading publicly on the New York Stock, debuting at $20.20 per share. Interestingly, the company is trading much as 77 percent above its IPO price. Box offers companies cloud-based storage services, make it easy to share documents with your team or your company. Last year in November, BOX and Cisco has announced an alliance that includes product integrations to enhance content collaboration for Project Squared, Cisco’s new business collaboration app.
Box C-suites are no fool. According to MarketsandMarkets, the enterprise collaboration market is expected to grow from $47.30 billion in 2014 to $70.61 billion in 2019.
How does the Box IPO make the enterprise collaboration giddy?
The success of the Box IPO proves the important repercussions for the enterprise collaboration market. Huddle CEO, Alastair Mitchell, said to technowatt that anticipation around the Box IPO has been building at a feverish clip and its IPO is a vital step for the market. It’s driving a broader dialog concerning the enterprise worth of collaboration. Moreover its success so far validates investor confidence in the company.
According to an article published in Wall Street Journal, the investors in Box are betting that software maker can grow beyond the commodity business of online storage. However, BOX fetched the same valuation in stock market that they did from private investors. The emerging cloud enterprise software market will sustain several billion-dollar revenue businesses with its current growth rate.
IT giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have already shown interest for the cloud collaboration space and their willingness to compete on price. Microsoft is offering Yammer and OneDrive along with Office 365 for business. Google is betting for productivity software and Drive storage. Box wants customers to use its file-sharing and storage service along with BoxNotes and Office integration. Even Dropbox, almost six years old cloud storage company that is serving to individual consumers till now, has also plans to step into enterprise market.
Here, BOX is competing with larger wealthier companies. The challenge for Box will be to attain good results in Q3 and Q4 and face competition pressure head-on. Box, though, is poised to slowly move away from its free personal accounts service and add value its enterprise customers.
Flickr photo via Creative Commons
