By Emmanuel Okwuke / Senior IT. Correspondent
In a newly released study, International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that the File Synchronisation and Sharing (FSS) market will grow at a 23.1 per cent five-year Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2018 to $2.3billion.
The healthy growth rate through 2018 will continue to be driven by the shift to cloud, mobile use of FSS, and the ability to share and collaborate with others effectively.
The overall FSS market grew 114per cent in 2013 to $805million, while use in the workplace was significantly faster than last year’s forecast of 72 per cent growth.
Additional findings from the study include, the top five vendors in the overall market accounted for 73.3 per cent market revenue in 2013. They are Apple, Box, Citrix, Dropbox, and Microsoft.
Many of the vendors in the FSS market offer FSS as a free service, causing adoption among consumers at home and in the workplace to be heavily under represented by revenue.
IDC estimates that roughly half of US enterprises with more than 1,000 employees either formally or informally adopted FSS by the end of 2013. “File sync and share is being approached from a number of different market polarities to meet a wide variety of business challenges,” said Research Director, Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies, Vanessa Thompson.
“The file synchronization and sharing market is rapidly commoditizing. Over time, bundled vendor products and offerings will start to serve a variety of specialized market needs alongside pure play file sync and share products,” he said.
Source : Independent