The “IT-ization of Consumers”: What We Can Learn From Box

(Too) much has been written about the “consumerization of IT.” We get it. BYOD is here to stay. (Was it ever not?) Enterprise software companies will have to behave more like consumer software companies.

We wrote recently about Salesforce, its embrace of social software and its focus on the user. They are perhaps the poster child for the consumerization of IT. However, there’s a new market requirement. Let’s call it the “IT-ization of consumers.” As consumer deployments now reach enterprise-scale through the cloud, there is a growing user imperative to focus on enterprise-class solutions that incorporate security and scale. With user autonomy now comes a significant degree of responsibility.

We’re not suggesting that users will change behavior and sacrifice functionality. Instead, we believe we will see the emergence of a category of vendors that offer competitive user functionality while satisfying a higher standard for enterprise class, and that prudent users will select these offerings. There is perhaps no software company who better understands the consumer imperative while meeting enterprise requirements than Box. Who? If you’ve never heard of Box before, well, they’re probably in use somewhere in your enterprise: 92% of the Fortune 500 are using Box in at least a departmental solution.

If you’ve heard of Box before, you probably lumped them in with Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsft SkyDrive and a multitude of other cloud storage providers. That’s a convenient comparison, but ultimately a poor one.