We’ve been talking about cloud deployment a lot this week so it’s appropriate that we finish up with an example of how rapid this market is developing. According to figures released by cloud content management vendor Box.net, the company now has 5 million users with enterprise revenues more than tripling over the course of the year.
Most of the new deployments, Box.net says, were in large enterprises, with 73% of Fortune 500 companies using its platform in some shape, means or form, a total of 60,000 businesses, and some significant wins including Skype and ABC News.
That’s what Box.net (news, site) says, but again, like last year, it hasn’t provided any details to back all these claims up. At the end of 2009, the SharePoint competitor announced they had 3.5 million customers and an increase in revenues of 535%.
Box.net and the Cloud
However, 2010 was the year in which Box.net really got out of their box.
2010 was a breakout year for Box, as larger enterprises recognized the cost, maintenance and productivity benefits of moving their content and collaboration to the cloud,” Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box said.
And this is what is really important in these figures. While it has been clearly a very successful year for Box.net, it has built that success on changing enterprise attitudes to the cloud, largely it would seem because many firms feel a lot better about cloud security than they did before, and they’ve also been looking at deployment times and cost savings too.
Only recently, for example, we saw in a MarketBridge survey that even across the SMB sector adoption of cloud-based information technologies is speeding up with 44% of SMBs claiming to have at least one business application located in a private or public cloud.
via Box.net’s Cloud and Mobile Technology Underpins ‘Break-Out’ Year.