Of employees using file sync and share tools at work, 89 percent are using consumer products and only 9 percent of those using this technology are satisfied with the commercial offering given to them by the corporate IT department, according to research firm Ovum. The company’s 2014 global employee survey of 5,187 full-time employees shows that users are sticking with familiar consumer tools to share corporate documents and access them from mobile devices.
The survey data suggests that 29 percent of employees using the technology are using three or more consumer and/or commercial products, while 44 percent are not using file sync and share products at all. The latter rely on email and memory sticks to shuttle data around.
“These figures paint an anarchic picture of file sharing and document-centric collaboration within the workplace, and support Ovum’s thesis that while there may be an enterprise file sync and share solution to address almost every business need, there is no product that meets them all,” Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum, said in a statement.
The report, “Selecting an Enterprise File Sync and Share Product,” assesses 19 offerings from vendors including Box, Citrix, Dropbox, Egnyte, EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and WatchDox.
“No commercial product is dominating the workplace,” Edwards said. “The wide-scale use of Dropbox among knowledge workers highlights the power and impact of IT consumerization, while the pervasiveness of Google Drive and Apple iCloud demonstrates the effects that mobile devices are having on the enterprise. And of course Microsoft is omnipresent in this market, too.”
The number of products covered in the report shows the range of vendors in the market, according to Ovum. “As always, the challenge for CIOs and IT managers is to identify the solution that best meets the organization’s current and future requirements, with regard to a broad set of employee roles and business use cases,” Edwards said.
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