Box has announced an update to its Box for Salesforce on the Salesforce AppExchange, bringing Box Sign functionality.
Box is one of the leading cloud storage platforms and has been moving into the digital signature market with its Box Sign service. The company’s latest update brings the power of Box Sign to AppExchange customers.
The global pandemic greatly sped up the transition to digital documents, with remote teams needing a way to handle agreements and digital signatures. Box first entered the market in mid-2021, building its product on its SignRequest acquisition earlier that year. Since then, the company has been gaining customers and competing with existing players in the market, such as DocuSign and Adobe.
“From streamlining customer relationships to closing deals from anywhere, we are excited to fuel growth for our customers,” said Diego Dugatkin, Chief Product Officer at Box. “The innovation we are delivering today helps end-users work more fluidly with their Box content right from within Salesforce and gives developers additional flexibility to support a wide range of business processes. We are only scratching the surface of what Box and Salesforce can do together for customers, so you can expect to see even more developments between our two platforms in the future.”
For its part, Salesforce welcomed the new update and what it means for AppExchange customers.
“We are excited that Box is continuing to innovate on AppExchange to help our hundreds of joint customers move their critical business process to the cloud,” said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. “Digitizing transactions is a critical step in the process and with Box Sign for Salesforce, Box is simplifying the execution of documents from anywhere in a cost-effective way. AppExchange is constantly evolving to meet the needs of our customers, and we love watching our partners evolve alongside us.”
Box is rolling out native e-signature capabilities, in the form of Box Sign.
Box has been under increased pressure to improve its standing in the market. Unlike some of its competitors, Box has not experienced as much pandemic-fueled success as other cloud platforms, despite being the perfect platform for remote work.
The company is rolling out Box Sign, in an effort to help grow its reach. The new feature is based on the company’s SignRequest acquisition in February. The native e-signature features will be included in all business plans.
“Every day, more transactions are moving from paper-based manual workflows to the cloud, and we will only see this trend accelerate as companies shift to a hybrid work environment,” said Diego Dugatkin, Chief Product Officer at Box. “With the addition of natively embedded e-signatures, Box customers will be able to manage the entire content lifecycle in the cloud, realizing the value of their content — at no additional cost. From the moment a file is created to when it’s shared, edited, published, approved, signed, classified, and retained, the entire content lifecycle can now happen in the Box Content Cloud.”
Box, the popular file-sharing cloud service, is exploring a possible sale in response to pressure from an activist shareholder.
Box is one of the premier file-sharing cloud services, and one of the main competitors to Dropbox. Unfortunately, Box has not capitalized on the remote work transformation currently underway to the same extent as its rivals. This has led hedge fund Starboard Value LP to threaten a challenge to the board.
Now Reuters is reporting that Box is considering a sale to another company or private equity form. One of the issues Box has faced is the crowded field it competes in, with many of its services matched by larger rivals with more comprehensive offerings. For example, Microsoft 365 comes with a OneDrive account, featuring 1 TB of storage.
Box did not comment on Reuter’s story, and it remains to be seen if a deal will happen. The sources indicated a sale is not certain.
I’m a pretty annoying founder. I’m very stubborn and very steadfast. Sort of this is my very strongly held opinion and belief and I’m gonna run into a wall to prove it out. That has certain characteristics that can be annoying at times I’m sure both at the investor level as well as for anybody that is working with me. I’ve been able to tone it down over the years and control it more and contain it. I think it’s not causing probably as much annoyance.
You have to be stubborn and right is the key. Stubborn and wrong means new job. There’s a Venn diagram of stubborn and right and you want to be right in that target zone. I look back when when I was 20, 21, or 22 and learning this trade and there were plenty of times where I was stubborn and wrong where maybe I took too long to pivot.
My co-founder was telling me we’ve got to go enterprise probably for three to six months earlier than we actually did. What are three to six months in compounding terms? I don’t know. Maybe we’d be 20 percent bigger now as a result of if I had not been so stubborn at that stage and not seeing the information in the way that he was? That can just be sometimes an annoying pattern that people run into.
Some of the biggest names in tech have formed the Modern Computing Alliance, with the goal of transforming the cloud and its tools.
Cloud computing has become one of the biggest, most important trends in modern computing. Already well under way, the migration to cloud computing went into overdrive as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies around the world are relying on cloud computing to manage remote employees, stay productive and adapt to a new reality.
Unfortunately, migrating to the cloud is not always an easy task, especially for companies with decades of investment in legacy systems. The Modern Computing Alliance is aimed at “aligning standards and technologies to provide companies with the choice of high-performance, cloud-first computing solutions from the vendor of their choice who provide modern solutions for the modern era of business.”
Google’s John Solomon, VP Chrome OS, outlined the alliance’s vision in a blog post:
To drive ‘silicon-to-cloud’ innovation for the benefit of enterprise customers—fueling a differentiated modern computing platform and providing additional choice for integrated business solutions.
Solomon emphasized that any strong alliance needs a strong diversity of members, to help bring unique perspectives to the table. The Modern Computing Alliance certainly meets that criteria with its founding members: Box, Citrix, Dell, Google, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMWare and Zoom.
The Modern Computing Alliance members are specifically focused on four key areas:
Performance
Security and Identity
Remote, Collaboration and Productivity
Healthcare
“The shared goal among the Modern Computing Alliance members is to fuel innovation in these key areas and provide customers with preferred choices without the tradeoffs they may face with a single vendor,” writes VMware’s Kenny Takahashi.
“Customers will play an integral role in the Modern Computing Alliance through the Modern Computing IT Council, which will provide a forum for IT champions to make themselves heard. Customer IT Council participants will have exclusive lines of communication with Modern Computing Alliance members and help define the future of computing through research, advisory workshops, roadmap inputs, and solution testing.”
The Modern Computing Alliance looks like a promising step in the right direction toward making cloud computing even easier.
One of the many huge ramifications from pandemic lockdowns has been the advent of large physical conferences converted to virtual conferences. This has been especially true for enterprise software events. Box CEO Aaron Levie says that their annual conference last week held entirely virtual saw higher engagement with customers and much lower costs than last years San Francisco event held at Moscone Center.
CEOs around the country and the world are debating whether they should abandon expensive physical conferences altogether once the pandemic restrictions are lifted.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discussed this new reality, asking the question, how does this look in the future when you can actually have physical conferences? Do you still rely on a virtual first environment or do you have a bit of a hybrid conference?:
Box Virtual Conference Last Week Was A Huge Success
We did just have our virtual conference last week. We saw somewhere between four and five times the scale of registrations that we would normally see in one of our physical conferences. We saw higher engagement in a lot of areas than normally we would see. Overall, great levels of attendance and engagement on our keynotes and product updates. Certainly, as you can imagine, a much lower cost and much easier way to get this content out to our customers.
There are a lot of benefits to a virtual conference. We’re able to hit demographics of our customer base who previously wouldn’t have been able to fly out to San Francisco and come to Moscone for a two or three-day conference. There are real benefits of the scale of impact of customers we can interact with and engage with. There is a difference in terms of being able to have conversations one-on-one with customers. So it’s a different experience from that standpoint. But we were able to make do with the environment of having to move to virtual.
Now we’re really asking the question, how does this look in the future when you can actually have physical conferences? Maybe it’s next year or maybe it’s the year after. Do you still rely on a virtual first environment? Do you have a bit of a hybrid conference? These are some open questions that the industry’s going to have to ask. But overall, we were very happy with the success of the event.
“It’s been a funny journey working remotely,” says Box CEO Aaron Levie. “A month or two into the pandemic I distinctly remembered that we actually started our company completely remotely. The move to this remote work style is causing us to realize how different managing and leading businesses and executing can be if we were able to take advantage of virtual technology more even when we go back to the office. This completely opens up a new way of working.”
Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, discusses at the CNBC @Work Summit how remote working that was forced upon companies has actually opened them up to a completely new way of working:
It’s Been A Funny Journey Working Remotely
It’s been a funny journey working remotely. A month or two into the pandemic I actually distinctly remembered that wait a second, we actually started our company completely remotely. My co-founder and I were going to two different colleges at the time and so the whole business was run over instant messaging. Before we had Slack we had AOL Instant Messenger. Before we had Okta we had really bad passwords. We were a remote company and we started our own product because we wanted to make it so people could easily access and share files from anywhere. That was the origin of the business.
Fast forward 15 years later, we have 2,000 employees, we work in offices, we have a lot of the standard ways you think about when scaling up the company. When we had to instantly move to a remote and distributed way of working it really hit me how much of the work style that gets embedded into our companies are really actually things that just carried forward from the 20th Century when everything was analog and everything was done in person. All communication was done between people either through written communication or just a meeting.
Pandemic Opened Up New Way Of Working
You realize that when you go virtual and you go remote there is actually so much potential to be able to work in a digital-first way. When you think about a team meeting as an example, so many of our meetings are arbitrarily sized to the number of people that fit into a conference room. So it’s kind of bizarre that work just happens to be the six to twelve people that can fit into a conference room space. Certainly for software projects or a particular team that’s a pretty good logical size. But that’s not the right size that contributes to a brainstorm. That’s not inherently the right size of people that you want when you’re communicating information and getting the best ideas around how to go drive the business.
So having that Slack channel with 150 people in it that cuts across different parts of the organization we are able to get contributions from people that would have never been in that conference room previously. That completely opens up a new way of working. Think of what you now do on video and the ability to include voices and ideas from people that previously wouldn’t have spoken up or wouldn’t have had an easy opportunity to contribute to some particular part of the business or strategy or have a two-way dialogue on a really important business topic.
Real Potential That We Want To Continue
We had a meeting with all of our top 200 leaders in the company last week and that was a complete bidirectional discussion in a way that would never have been possible in person. That’s usually a person with a microphone just communicating outward to everybody in the business and not actually having it be a dialogue to get feedback. The move to this remote work style is causing us to realize actually how different management and leading businesses and executing can be if we were able to take advantage of virtual technology more even when we go back to the office.
None of this requires you to be remote it’s just sort of the remote that was forced upon all of us to the point that we are now realizing that there is actually some real potential here that we want to continue to maintain going forward.
“Snowflake is a very disruptive enterprise software company actually going out and going public larger than Google did,” says Box CEO Aaron Levie. “It’s a profound statement about the power of the cloud and the scale of these opportunities. We would not have anticipated ten years ago an enterprise software cloud company that doesn’t exist in 2010 going public at $60 or $70 billion. These markets are enormous and the opportunities for disruption only continues.”
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discusses how the Google-sized Snowflake IPO illustrates the “power of the cloud” and how disruptive it is to the past way of doing business:
Move To Digital Adds Tailwind For Cloud Companies
Certainly, the macro market is very volatile right now (for cloud and tech IPOs). You’re going to see a dynamic range of prices both on the day of an IPO and the subsequent trading (for companies like Snowflake). We’re going to have a lot of different narratives about did people leave money on the table, did stocks go down or up in any of these kinds of trading periods.
The broader macro thing that we’re seeing is that these are companies that in many cases were founded seven, eight, nine, ten years ago. They’ve now reached a scale with even more of a tailwind right now because of this move to digital. These are companies going after incredibly large multi-billion and multi-tens of billion-dollar markets um that have a tremendous amount of growth going forward in front of them.
You’re just going to continue to see this IPO pipeline. Over the past decade, we’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of very disruptive enterprise software companies emerge and get funded and really be able to reach scale.
Snowflake IPO Shows Power Of The Cloud
I remember Google having this jaw-dropping valuation and game-changing and historic IPO in terms of its scale. Then you have Snowflake which is a company that is not necessarily known by consumers generally. But it’s a very disruptive enterprise software company actually going out and going public larger than Google did. It’s a profound statement about the power of the cloud and the scale of these opportunities. For Snowflake to be as big as Google a lot of other things would have to happen in terms of their portfolio.
The size of these companies and the markets they’re going after are so enormous. We would not have anticipated that five or ten years ago if you had said are you going to see an enterprise software cloud company that doesn’t exist today, back in 2010, going public at $60 or $70 billion? I don’t know who you’d be able to find that would say yes to that. These markets are enormous and the opportunities for disruption only continues. I think we’re just going to continue to see more and more companies go public.
We Didn’t Feel We Left Money On The Table
It’s great that there are lots of different ways to do an IPO, direct listings, and more of a traditional IPO. It’s fantastic that the market supports different approaches. Now you have SPACs in the mix as well. We went public with a fairly traditional approach. Our stock went up by 70 percent or so on the first day of trading. We didn’t really feel like we left money on the table. We were happy to be public. We got great investor support. Some of these things are easy to look at in retrospect. You don’t often know the sheer demand for a new public offering at the start of the IPO process. Some of this ends up being easy to to to be able to comment on after the fact.
From an entrepreneur and from a company and corporate standpoint, your biggest priority when you’re going public is making sure you can educate investors, building a strong set of support in your IPO process. Sort of incrementally leaving 10 or 20 percent of financing on the table is not usually the most important factor that you’re focused on. Maybe it should be which is again why it’s great to have these different points of view out there.
“We have been thrust into remote work without a lot of the preparation and in some cases underlying infrastructure, data security, or underlying cloud platforms,” says Box CEO Aaron Levie. “What we’re finding, and certainly at least for the organizations that have had the ability to adapt successfully to this environment, is that there are better ways to get work done.”
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discusses how the pandemic has thrust companies into remote work and this will move enterprises toward a hybrid workplace:
We Have Been Thrust Into Remote Work
We have been thrust into remote work without a lot of the preparation and in some cases underlying infrastructure, data security, or underlying cloud platforms. What we’re finding, and certainly at least for the organizations that have had the ability to adapt successfully to this environment, is that there are better ways to get work done. Now that we’ve moved to this virtual way of working there are a lot of situations where we used to have to do business travel. Being able to quickly hop on a Webex or a Skype call or a Zoom session is actually much more efficient to be able to have that conversation.
We have a lot of situations that Box internally and with our customers where normally you might be collaborating with five or ten people in a meeting inside of a conference room. Now you can move that to a Slack channel and actually communicate with maybe 50 or 100 people on that same project. You’re actually building a much more inclusive organization with way more people that can be engaged and involved in your ultimate vision and what you’re executing on. We’re seeing actually some really positive ways of working in this environment.
The Future Is A Hybrid Workplace
Any tech company and any company globally really wants to get back to some version of normal. We certainly want offices to open up as quickly as possible. We want to make sure that we can see our colleagues in person. But I do think that there’s no going back from this new virtual way of being able to stay productive. The future is one of a hybrid workplace where you go into the office for some experiences and purposes and then you’re also going to be able to have much more flexibility and be able to work remotely. The digital workplace is what’s going to then bridge those two worlds together.
By and large, cost savings is not the main factor of why you’ve seen so much excitement around remote work or more workplace flexibility. If you can be just as productive from your laptop on a Slack channel and over a Zoom call but you could then be in any place that you desire as opposed to being in a 60 or 90-minute commute each way and paying way too much for real estate. For those of us that live in Silicon Valley, this is a very expensive real estate market. So if you could have better flexibility and be able to have a little bit more space and you can stay just as productive, wouldn’t that be a better way of working?
Lot’s Of Reasons Why Offices Will Still Exist
What companies are realizing is as they want to actually give that choice out to their employees. They can still run very productive organizations. We at Box have been able to drive as much innovation in this environment as we have in an office environment. We want to make sure that we’re creating that type of flexibility for employees. That being said, there are a lot of benefits to being able to work in an office with your colleagues.
For younger employees that are just integrating into the workplace for the first time you want to get to know your colleagues and you want to be able to be a part of maybe a more than just a business community. You may actually want to be able to build your business network through that experience. Also important is mentorship and being able to make sure that you’ve got more camaraderie. There are a lot of reasons why offices are still going to exist in the future. But digital technology is going to afford companies to have way greater flexibility no matter which route they choose.
“We are firing on all cylinders right now even though it’s a very dynamic environment,” says Box CEO Aaron Levie. “One of the great ironies probably that we’ll look back on is that the industry that is focused on selling digital technology spent so much time in the physical world trying to sell that technology. You can do remote selling over a video conference, over Webex, or Zoom in many cases just as easily as you could in person.”
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discusses how tech companies during the pandemic have discovered that it’s more effective for them to sell remotely using all of the technologies they have developed rather than relying so much on physical meetings:
We Are Firing On All Cylinders Right Now
We were super happy about the Q2 that we just announced a couple of weeks ago. We were able to beat on revenue estimates and the guidance we gave on revenue, on EPS, on operating margin, and we also delivered strong billings and cash flow performance. We also raised our guidance for the full year on revenue as well as our operating margin targets for the full year.
We are firing on all cylinders right now even though it’s a very dynamic environment. Obviously, the broader macroeconomic environment still remains a challenge in many sectors. We are seeing growth at this time and we’re seeing a lot of our enterprise customers continue to expand with us as they go and drive broader digital transformation initiatives.
Great Irony: Tech Industry Learns To Sell Digitally
One of the great ironies probably that we’ll look back on is that the industry that is focused on selling digital technology spent so much time in the physical world trying to sell that technology. We’re seeing is that customers want really great products. They want those products to be delivered efficiently to them. You can do remote selling over a video conference, over Webex, or Zoom in many cases just as easily as you could in person. The other benefit is you can now reach more customers in a single day or in a single week.
As an example, we have our customer conference happening tomorrow. We’ll have about 25 000 registered attendees to that event which is three or four times larger than what we would have in the physical world. We’re able to reach more customers and we’re able to have more conversations. We’re ultimately able to support our customers right now with our technology which is helping them move to the cloud and helping them secure their corporate data. It is also easier to collaborate securely across enterprises and then ultimately integrate with all of their applications.
Box CEO Aaron Levie: Digital Selling Helping Tech Firms Prosper
“We saw very strong enterprise growth in the last quarter,” says Box CEO Aaron Levie. “We grew our number of big deals, which we measure as deals above $100,000 in transaction value, by 60 from Q1 to Q2 of this year. We’re happy about the momentum that we’re seeing in the business. Right now we are all hands on deck on supporting our customers and their digital transformation strategies and hopefully really enabling them to have a more secure and more seamless way to work in this environment.”
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discusses the company’s continued growth and progress in supporting customers with their push toward digital transformation:
Driving Better Balance Between Growth And Profitability
We’re very happy about the quarter that we just put up. We are stabilizing the growth rate with 11 percent revenue growth. We had nearly a 16 percent operating margin for the quarter. That’s been a trend that we’ve obviously been driving for the past year or so around really driving a better balance between growth and profitability. We improved our guidance on both revenue growth and profitability for the rest of the year. We guided to about 12 to 13 percent operating margin for the full year (FY21) and so we do think these results are sustainable.
Obviously, we want to be able to continue to drive them going into next year and beyond. We’re very happy about the efficiency of the business right now as well as our ability to go out and serve customers and help them power a new way to work in this very very you know dynamic landscape.
All Hands On Deck With Digital Transformation
The first couple quarters of the year we had to step back and figure out in this economy and in this market what could we do to best serve our customer base. In some segments, we had to lean in to make sure that we were better supporting our customers. In other segments, we saw more growth because in spaces like financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and the tech sector there’s still a tremendous amount of economic growth occurring. So we had to do a little bit of a reset in some of our segments, especially the SMB segment. and we’re seeing really healthy pipeline for the second half of the year.
At the same time, we saw very strong enterprise growth among these customers. We grew our number of big deals, which we measure as deals above $100,000 in transaction value, by 60 from Q1 to Q2 of this year. We’re happy about the momentum that we’re seeing in the business. We do expect that we’re going to continue to drive growth coming into the second half of the year. Right now we are all hands on deck on supporting our customers and their digital transformation strategies and hopefully really enabling them to have a more secure and more seamless way to work in this environment.
Need Better Interoperability Between Technologies
In the enterprise segment, you deal with similar questions (as consumer-facing companies do with anti-trust). How do we ensure long-term that you have interoperability between our technologies? If I put my data into one cloud platform will I have the ability to make that data work with other applications from other cloud technologies? Whether or not there needs to be oversight that’s obviously going to be a big question for the government.
What I do think across the industry we do need to continue to work on better standards. We need to drive better interoperability between our technologies. I can say confidently that companies like Microsoft and Google and others are working on making sure that we have greater interoperability between our technology stack. We work with companies like Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, and others to make sure that we have that interoperability as well. But there’s still a long way to go to really create a seamless experience for the broader customer base out there.
No Precedent For The Type of TikTok Deals Playing Out
Aaron Levie: I don’t understand business anymore, but this is very fun to watch.
This is obviously a very strange environment (in reference to TikTok deal rumors). I don’t think there’s been a precedent for this type of acquisition playing out ever. Especially in the back of the antitrust element, you don’t have the logical acquirers of this type of social media technology at play. All you really have are these interesting configurations of maybe not the most classic acquirers of a social tool. This is causing a lot of questions on what is the long-term strategic nature of these deals.
This is especially true for companies that don’t have a strong advertising business model or might not have some of the same demographic within their customer base. That being said, all of the players, whether it’s Larry Ellison or Satya or Doug at Walmart, these are all incredibly smart and savvy business people. I’m sure that behind the scenes there’s quite a deal of strategy going on but it’s certainly fun to watch play out.
Box CEO Aaron Levie: All Hands On Deck With Digital Transformation
Apple has fired a shot across the bow of Dropbox, Box and others with the addition of iCloud File Sharing.
Steve Jobs famously tried to buy Dropbox years before the company went public, describing the business as a “feature, not a product.” In the ensuing years, Apple has slowly (some might say glacially) improved iCloud to better compete with dedicated file storage options, including offering a level of integration that other services struggle to match.
First announced at WWDC 2019, with the latest round of iOS, iPadOS and macOS updates, the File Sharing feature has finally debuted.
“With iCloud File Sharing, you can share folders and documents in iCloud Drive with other iCloud users,” reads Apple’s support site. “You and the people you invite can view and even work on your documents. The people who receive your invitation can click a link to download the shared folder or file from iCloud to any of their devices. Everyone views the same shared items. If you allow others to make edits, they can change the files and you see the updates the next time you open the files on your Mac.”
iCloud’s new feature includes all the necessary options to control who can do what with a given file or folder. While iCloud File Sharing won’t replace Dropbox, Box or others for heavy use, or in a business setting, it will likely cause many casual users to rethink their subscriptions to third-party services.
Google has announced that its iOS Gmail app has (finally) added the ability to include attachments from the iOS Files app.
Introduced in iOS 11, the Files app acts as a sort of file system for iOS. The app makes it possible to access files in iCloud, the local device, as well as any apps or services that store files, such as Dropbox, Box or PDF Expert.
Unfortunately, until now, one of the most popular email clients on iOS has not supported adding attachments via Files. With today’s announcement, Google has finally addressed the omission and added the ability.
According to the blog post, “in the Gmail iOS app, when composing or replying to an email, click the attachment icon and scroll to the ‘Attachments’ section. Then select the folder icon to select an attachment from the Files app.”
This is a welcome addition to an email client countless people rely on.
Google has announced its acquisition of “AppSheet, a leading no-code application development platform used by a number of enterprises across a variety of industries.”
Custom applications are an excellent way for businesses to meet their needs and adapt to an ever-evolving landscape. As Google points out in their post, however, not all businesses have the resources to have a large, in-house development team. No-code or low-code solutions are an excellent way to address that shortcoming and AppSheet is one of the best available.
The platform uses a database, spreadsheet or form to build a mobile app. According to the company site, “AppSheet will automatically generate an app by using the data in your column header (i.e. the first row of your spreadsheet) as fields. These fields determine how the app captures or displays data.” Once the data is pulled in, the platform’s tools provide a way to alter how the app looks and behaves.
“AppSheet complements Google Cloud’s strategy to reimagine the application development space with a platform that helps enterprises innovate with no-code development, workflow automation, application integration and API management as they modernize their business processes in the cloud,” wrote Amit Zavery, Google Cloud VP of Business Application Platform. “AppSheet’s ability to power a range of applications—from CRM to field inspections and personalized reporting—combined with Google Cloud’s deep expertise in key verticals, will further enable digital transformation across industries like financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, communication and media & entertainment.”
AppSheet currently works with AWS, Box, Dropbox, Office 365, Salesforce and other cloud hosted databases. Both Google’s announcement and an announcement on AppSheet’s site reassures users AppSheet will remain cross-platform.
Workona has announced “the launch of their cloud desktop, a work management platform that allows users to access and manage resources across more than 75 popular cloud apps from a single unified system.”
The company recently completed “a $6 million seed funding round, led by K9 Ventures and August Capital, to accelerate its product development and user acquisition.”
Recognizing that “modern teams run on cloud software,” Workona is trying to bring the disparate pieces of a cloud-based workflow together in a productive, intuitive manner. Workona’s cloud-based desktop connects to the most popular cloud apps in use today, such as Amazon, Asana, Basecamp, Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs, Outlook, Zoom and more. Each app can be accessed and worked with inside Workona. Shared workspaces take collaboration up a notch, increasing productivity even more.
“So many people spend their days working in the cloud, but there was no platform to manage that work. That’s what Workona does,” said Quinn Morgan, Workona co-founder and CEO. “Previously, all of your cloud apps, projects, and documents were scattered across the web. Workona’s cloud desktop pulls them together into one powerful system.”
Having a central location to access different tools and platforms significantly increases a user’s efficiency.
“Workona is a force multiplier because it impacts every level of your work,” Morgan said. “Your apps and projects are at your fingertips, so every action you take is significantly faster.”
“Workona solves a problem that is staring us in the face, but we haven’t noticed it yet,” said Manu Kumar, Workona board member and K9 Ventures investor. “Microsoft and Apple used to put an enormous amount of engineering power into optimizing the desktop, but all that was forgotten when we transitioned to working in the browser. Workona has picked up where they left off by bringing the best features of a desktop to the cloud.”
The company says that early users come “from both startups and Fortune 500 companies, and include industry leaders like Twitter, Salesforce, Amazon, and NASA.” It’s a safe bet that list will continue to grow.
The digital transformation which has been powering the growth of many technology companies in the US is now starting to drive growth globally according to Box CEO Aaron Levie. He says that Box has a global opportunity where multi-national enterprises want to drive the same digital transformation that has been happening in the US.
Aaron Levie, Box CEO, discussed on CNBC how the digital transformation is key to driving Box’s growth globally.
Digital Transformation Driving Global Growth
As our business gets more seasonally loaded toward the back end of the year as we sell to larger and larger enterprises. That’s what ultimately drives a much higher billings growth outcome in Q4. We continue to move up-market serving larger enterprises like major top ten banks, pharmaceuticals, life sciences companies, as well as the federal government and global manufacturers. That’s what’s driving that surge in Q4 billings and growth rate.
We have a global opportunity where large enterprises, especially multi-national enterprises, want to drive the same digital transformation that we’ve seen in the US. That means everything from changing their business processes to collaborating and working in new ways which leads them to need platforms like Box and other technologies. We are seeing incredible growth in markets like Japan, Canada, Australia, and throughout Europe.
Our Partner Model is Critical to Our Success
We are working with major partners like IBM and other system integrators to be able to reach and enable customers. We are working with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, as well as a much broader ecosystem including companies like Slack, Okta, and others, to ensure that when customers want to modernize their IT environment Box is the system of record for the data and content that they work with.
Partners are core to our strategy both from a technology standpoint to ensure that customers have an integrated experience with their information technology investment as well as helping us actually reach those customers from a distribution and sales standpoint. Our partner model is critical to our success.
We Are Building a Fundamentally Open Platform
Our fundamental belief is that in the digital age enterprises are going to need a platform to help them secure, manage, govern, and drive the workflows around their core business information. That is what the platform is that we’re building. Whether it’s financial documents, digital assets, a pharmaceutical company with their drug trial information, or an ad company with their ad campaigns, we want to be the platform that helps them manage and secure that data.
We will have to work with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others to ensure that the technology that they’re investing in can link to the data that customers store within Box. We are building a fundamentally open platform and whether that is linking up to the artificial intelligence or machine learning technology that IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others are building or the common applications that we use every day we want to ensure that Box can connect to all of those applications so that you can have one source of truth for your data but integrated everywhere.
Box CEO Aaron Levie says that the IBM-Red Hat Deal showed what the underlying value of incumbent technology companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and “hopefully Box” is potentially worth.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, was interviewed on CNBC about the impact of the IBM-Red Hat deal on Box:
Red Hat Deal Puts IBM in a Great Position
Red Hat is a leader in commercial open source technology which is really the future of computing in any real IT environment or software development and IBM now has one of the world’s best companies in the open source space and the multi-cloud space.
I think it puts them in an incredible position to help enterprises that are moving to a multi-cloud environment be able to run their data centers and run their operations, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises and a hybrid model for the future. It puts IBM in a great position.
IBM-Red Hat Deal Shows Increased Underlying Value
This is obviously an incredibly bold move on the part of Ginni (Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM) and the rest of the team but one that I think we will look back in five or ten years and say that was a very defining decision. IBM is a great partner and we obviously want to root for their success but we partner with probably the majority of software and technology companies in the industry, so our job is to be interoperable and integrate with all the major technologies our customers use.
What the (IBM-Red Hat) deal showed was that the underlying value of some of these significant players is in many cases worth a lot – especially big incumbents. I think in general, companies like Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and hopefully Box, we’re trying to build industry defining companies that will last quite some time.
Becoming a Core Part of the Technology Stack
I think, in general, when you think about enterprise IT, enterprise IT buyers are making long-term investments in the future of their technology architecture. It’s very sticky and there are massive modes in the technology that are being built out and if we do our job and continue to innovate we will become a core part of the technology stack of how the future of all enterprises operate.
That’s why these deals end up actually looking pretty good in hindsight when you can see how powerful these platforms are.
Nearly a year ago, Microsoft announced the Cloud Storage Partner Program for Office, enabling third-party storage providers like Box, Citrix ShareFile, and Salesforce to connect their services to Office Online for document viewing and editing. This followed a previously announced partnership with Dropbox.
On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s making Office easier for customers to use with such cloud storage providers by adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services. They’re extending Office for iOS integration to al partners in the program, enabling integration between Outlook.com and storage services.
“Since 2013, we’ve offered real-time co-authoring with Office Online documents stored in Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online,” says Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer. “Today, we are extending this capability to cloud storage providers in the CSPP program. Real-time co-authoring with Office Online is now available for users whose documents are stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Also starting today, any other partner in the CSPP program can enable real-time co-authoring using standard interfaces.”
“Starting today, in addition to Dropbox, we’re offering all CSPP partners the opportunity to tightly integrate with Office for iOS,” he adds. “This integration lets users designate these partner cloud services as “places” in Office, just as they can with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. Users can now browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their favorite cloud service right from within an Office app. They can open, edit or create in these apps with confidence that their files will be updated right in the cloud. Users can also open Office files from their cloud storage app in Office, then save any changes directly back to the cloud. We’ll follow with other mobile platforms later this year.”
Microsoft also announced that Dropbox and Box Outlook integrations, which it has offered in mobile apps in the past, are now coming to users of the new Outlook.com so they can attach files from these services right from their inboxes.
