Box competitors hopeful of market boost ahead of IPO

Rivals say the success of the IPO rests upon Box's ability to push into the enterprise market

Box's file sharing competitors have revealed they are hopeful its impending IPO will provide the file sync and share market with a boost.

The IPO will see the file sharing company offering shares between $11 and $13, and if its shares go for $12, it will be valued at $1.43bn (£950m), according to press reports. That is however much lower than the valuation of $2.4bn it received last summer.

But Alastair Mitchell, chief executive of Huddle, a software collaboration firm which allows businesses to share documents, said he thought the Box IPO will be successful.

"As Box is moving increasingly towards the collaboration space and away from file sync and share and storage, I think the IPO will prove successful," he claimed.

"The company has added more collaboration features to its offering and collaboration is now where the real value lies, driving greater productivity, helping decision making, and supporting in business growth."

Yorgen Edholm, chief executive of managed file transfer vendor Accellion, said the Box IPO could be good for the enterprise file sync and share market (EFSS), as it will provide it with more attention, which is positive for all the players in the market.

He said the success of the Box IPO rests on its ability to prove itself in the enterprise market.

"While the company has seen significant success, largely through its consumer base growth, the real money lies with large enterprise deployments. Box will need to prove that it has the security chops to grow that segment of its business in addition to its consumer segment," he added.

Ian McEwan, president and general manager for EMEA at enterprise file sharing specialist Egnyte, echoed Edholm's thoughts that the Box IPO will bring attention to the EFSS market and commented that the IPO "validates the market we play in".

Meanwhile, Egnyte's chief executive Vineet Jain said the IPO, if priced correctly, could "spark a 2015 enterprise IPO bull run".

But he remarked: "If they price incorrectly, it may cause a major correction in the markets and create a cooling-off period for tech companies looking to go public."

The Box IPO follows the recent Alibaba public offering, which became the world's largest in September totalling $25bn.