However, there's now more at play than employees bringing their latest toys into the office and wanting to use them for work, Levie said.

"Previously, you had end-users bringing devices in ... but now you have end-users who can bring applications in," he said. Rather than IT departments being sold on a new technology by a vendor that came in to make a deal with the company, now individual employees are adopting Box.net and then getting their enterprises interested in it, Levie said.

As a result, Box.net doesn't have to target companies of a specific size. "Fundamentally, the end users in these organizations are acting and behaving very similarly," Levie said.

As rank-and-file employees introduce new hardware and software and want corporate support for it, with potential productivity benefits for the company, their relationship with the technology specialists changes, MobileIron's Tinker said. IT departments are more willing to work with users and give them what they want.

"It's shifting from a very parental model to much more of an adult relationship," Tinker said.