While attending a major ECM conference earlier this year, it was
obvious that Box.net had decided to use the event as their “coming
out” party. Box.net is a cloud content management company
that is positioning itself directly against SharePoint 2010. In
fact, they are claiming that 73% of Fortune 500 companies are
already using their service.
On their website, Box.net invites people to compare the cost of
SharePoint to Box.net through the use of a simple
calculator. So being the inquisitive type, I decided to give it
a try!
After inputting several sample company sizes, it was easy to see
that Box.net is focusing their “advantage” on the upfront
hardware/SharePoint server costs and what they call
“deployment/customization/migration/training” costs and NOT on
ongoing costs. I also found the model definitely skewed towards
smaller sized companies. In fact, when you input a company size of
10,000, even using their model, there is a clear advantage to using
on-premise SharePoint with a payback period of a around 2 years or
so.
A couple of other interesting observations, the
Box.net model uses a SharePoint client access license (CAL)
cost of $178 per user, which is fine. But this assumes that an
organization does not already have SharePoint CALs in place for
their users, which depending on their Enterprise Agreement with
Microsoft, they may already have SharePoint CALs as part of their
agreement.
Also, much of the upfront costs in their model seem to be
focused on end-user training for SharePoint, while Box.net
positions their product as requiring zero training. From watching
some of their videos and actually trialing their product, zero
training is certainly not the case.
From their model, they assume an upfront
deployment/customization/migration/training cost of approximately
$1,424 per user. It is not specified how much of that figure is
allocated for training, but I would assume a fairly
significant amount. From a Colligo perspective, since Colligo
Contributor makes SharePoint so easy to use, the addition of
Contributor to any SharePoint deployment will provide for an
excellent offset to any upfront training costs.
setup, hardware, maintenance and CALs required for on-premise
SharePoint, these perceived advantages disappear when compared to
Microsoft’s upcoming Office365 and SharePoint Online
offering. Also, the per month per user subscription fee for
Box.net of $15 for the business edition and $30 for the enterprise
edition, doesn’t compare very well to the SMB version
of Office365 for $6, the higher-end enterprise version for $10 and
the big kahuna version for $24 that includes the full functionality
of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online, plus the desktop version
of Office Professional Plus.
With SharePoint dominating the on-premise enterprise content
management market and soon, the cloud market, it’s not surprising
that competitors like Box.net are springing up to try to carve out
a piece of the pie. However it takes a lot more than a big splash
at a tradeshow and a comparison calculator to become a player in
the ECM and records management market.
Article wrote by Trevor Dyck, Director of Product Management, Colligo Networks
Come to the European
SharePoint Conference.
