Reference no: EM132842287

Case: Dropbox - File Sharing Software Industry

The industry for file-storage software industry has witnessed tremendous growth in last five years. The proliferation of devices, operating systems, and applications has dramatically increased the volume and complexity of content in the workplace. Content is now routinely scattered across multiple silos, making it harder to access. According to a 2016 IDC report, more than half of companies ranging from 100 to 5,000+ employees use at least three repositories for accessing documents on a weekly basis. The content created at work tends to follow a predictable pattern: It's authored, sent out for feedback, and shared or published once it's done. At the same time, teams are organizing that content and coordinating tasks around it. But many of the tools people use today don't work well together and support only one or two steps of the content lifecycle. This requires users to constantly switch between these tools and makes it even harder to get work done. The IT departments of large organizations are continuously looking for solutions that can enable their users to fluidly use contents across different tools. Further, technology hasn't kept up with a modern workforce that's increasingly fluid and mobile. People work together on teams that span different functions, organizations, and geographies. A 2016 study by Deloitte found that 37% of the global workforce is now mobile, 30% of full-time employees primarily work remotely, and 20% of the workforce is made up of temporary workers, contractors, and freelancers. The ability to swiftly disseminate content and its relevant context is critical to keeping teams in sync. This combination of scattered content, fragmented tools, and fluid team structures has led to decreased workplace productivity. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, knowledge workers spend approximately 60% of their time at work on tedious tasks such as searching for content, reviewing email, and re-sharing context to keep team members in the loop-what we call "work about work." This means they spend just 40% of their time doing the jobs they were hired to do. Together these trends have led to the rise of filestorage software industry. The industry is typically characterized by software that allows sharing of content across different devices, tools and between users. The software is typically purchased by large corporates to facilitate seamless flow of content across devices and tools. The vendors providing the file-storage software to large corporate typically customize their offering to the existing software infrastructure of the large corporates. Understanding of the existing software infrastructure is very critical to customize the filesharing software to needs of the large corporates. Therefore, large corporates typically prefer to purchase the file-sharing software from the existing vendors that are already managing the existing software infrastructure. Another emerging segment of users for the file-sharing software are individual users that use the file-sharing software to share content across devices. These users typically use basic standard offering which are available for free by many vendors. Although these individual users represent large portion of the industry, the revenues from this segment is still minimal. While enterprise customers tend to use products by single vendor for their entire file-storage and sharing needs, the individual users tend to use products from multiple vendors.

Question: Identity a general environment trend that led to the rise of file-sharing industry?