How niche cloud services can compete against the likes of Microsoft and Google

A recent study conducted by Osterman Research revealed the growing popularity of tools like Microsoft SharePoint. Between 2012 and 2014, the percentage of employees using SharePoint within an organization has risen from 39% to 75%.

A major reason for this terrific rise is due to the spurt in the use of intranet applications like document collaboration, file sharing and records management. Interestingly, file sharing on SharePoint (82% of respondents) appears to have trumped popular third party services like Dropbox (63% of respondents) at the workplace.

Intra-organisation collaboration is a major avenue for growth of cloud-based service providers. Unlike retail customers, enterprise-level partnerships help providers reach out to thousands of paying customers with minimal outreach.

This explains why Dropbox, despite its 200M+ user base is still second to SharePoint when it comes to enterprise patronage. While 100% of SharePoint users are enterprise customers who pay, less than 5% of Dropbox customers …