Amazon announces Zocalo, challenging Google Docs in the enterprise

Amazon has a message for the Google Docs team: Step away from the enterprise.

The Seattle, Wash.-based tech giant today announced Amazon Zocalo, a document storage and collaboration service for the enterprise. As you might expect for a Google Docs competitor, Zocalo enables users to store documents, sync them across devices, follow audit trails, and more. Folks can also offer coworkers feedback on content, affixing comments to specific areas of a shared PDF or webpage, for example.

Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels emphasized Zocalo’s ability to integrate into existing corporate networks.

“This is a true enterprise application, and as such, it integrates with the enterprise services you actually have,” he said onstage at Amazon’s AWS 2014 Summit in New York this morning.

That’s convenient for end users, who can log in with their existing corporate credentials, said AWS product manager Paul Duffy. It’s also a boon for enterprise IT departments, who can ensure only authorized users have access to the service, he said.

Amazon is positioning Zocalo as a good choice for the security-conscious enterprise (in other words, most large companies). With its extensive database footprint, Amazon can offer Zocalo customers geographic choice in where they want to store their data, Vogels said. (Right now, however, Amazon’s website indicates that Zocalo is only available via the company’s U.S. and Ireland data centers). It stores everything in Amazon S3, its cloud-based storage service, and encrypts all data both in transit and at rest, according to Vogels.

The service also includes some offline functionality. Specially designated files will download to a local device, like an iPad, enabling folks to access and edit them offline. When that device reconnects, the revised content will automatically upload.

Zocalo brings Amazon into closer competition with companies like Box, Dropbox, and Huddle, which each offer their own flavors of cloud storage and collaboration.

Amazon says Zocalo works on “any device,” including laptops, iPads, and Android tablets. The service costs $5 per user per month for 200GB of online storage. Customers using Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Web Services’ cloud-based desktop, get 50GB of free storage on Zocalo or can pay $2 per user per month for the full 200GB. Zocalo is available today in limited preview.

Above: Comments on a file stored in Amazon Zocalo.

Image Credit: Amazon

VentureBeat’s Ruth Reader contributed reporting to this article.