Friday, July 11, 2014

Amazon Takes On Enterprise Cloud Storage With Zocalo

Amazon Web Services, the web services arm of Amazon.com, said Thursday that it has launched an managed, enterprise storage service called Amazon Zocalo. Amazon.com said that the new service--currently in limited preview--will let enterprise customers store, share, and gather feedback on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents. Amazon said that current enterprise document and collaboration systems have "tried to be too many things to users" and are "overly complex and expensive". Zocalo has the potential to upset many, cloud-based enterprise storage companies--many of whom have been using Amazon's own AWS service as the back end storage for their services. It's unclear how those providers will react to Amazon's direct competition with their services--and ability to easily undercut their pricing. Amazon said it will charge $5 per user per month, including up to 200GB of storage.