Zocalo is designed to combine with Amazon WorkSpaces, says Ovum

LONDON, UK: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently introduced Zocalo, a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service. With Amazon Zocalo, customers can store, share, and gather feedback on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files - from the device of their choice.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst for enterprise mobility & productivity software at Ovum, comments:

"Zocalo is designed to combine with Amazon WorkSpaces (the company's fully managed, cloud-based, desktop computing service) to provide organizations with an alternative to traditional, on-premise virtualized desktop infrastructure solutions from companies like Citrix and VMware.

As a stand-alone product, Zocalo will initially target the document review process - one notch above the commodity file sync and share service typified by Dropbox. Ovum believes that Amazon is unlikely to woo customers away from established enterprise file sync and share vendors with Zocalo alone, but things get more interesting if one considers this product alongside Amazon WorkSpaces.

Amazon is currently charging $52 per month for its "Standard Plus" WorkSpace (which gives the user access to Microsoft Office 2010, a web browser, WinZip, and Adobe Reader), and for another $2 organizations can bolt on Zocalo and get a fully managed virtualized desktop.

Companies are steadily moving towards a model where employees are able to use any sanctioned device to access applications and data from any location, so it is important that IT purchasers select the most appropriate file sync and share product for the business by considering the needs of the employee along with IT management requirements. If businesses get this choice wrong they could lose control of their corporate data as employees switch to consumer-oriented file sync and share services."