Business

Box continues to see multiple opportunities to grow its business as the enterprise space becomes more dependent on the cloud, according to company executives.

“There was literally like a decade and a half where innovation had completely stopped,” Jeetu Patel, EVP of platform and chief strategy officer at Box, said June 6 at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology Conference in San Francisco. There was a “flat-lining of innovation” back then, before the arrival of services like those offered by Box, he said.

“There is a huge opportunity” for Box now because “there’s about $6.5 billion of spend that’s happening in content management, he went on to say, adding: “Companies are re-factoring and moving to the cloud and mobile, and these companies have not really gone out and re-architected themselves for a modern architecture.” Therefore, there’s a strong need for a company like Box.

Patel explained: “As you move to the cloud — and especially with new models that you have around — the boundaries between companies and external employees blurring more and more, and people wanting to have access to content on any device at any time, there is a fundamental set of assumptions that needed to be made in how you built your architecture that just wasn’t there with the previous group of vendors that we think we can displace.”

There’s now about a $40 billion market that “we think we can go out and meaningfully disrupt,” he told the conference, noting that includes network file storage, enterprise content management, and “people building custom apps and making sure that can provide our” application programming interfaces (APIs) “to do that more effectively.”

He pointed out: “We are in the very early innings of that… And most organizations are going to go down that path.” In the last 15-24 months, “the debate around whether or not to move to the cloud is now done,” he said, adding: “Most companies — especially [in] highly-regulated industries — are accelerating their move to the cloud because they feel like the security posture in the cloud is stronger than it is on-prem. And so, as a result of that, companies have decided they’re going to move to the cloud. Now it’s a matter of who are they going to go out and pick as a strategic set of partners to make that happen.”

Box is also “seeing a lot of opportunities working with channel partners,” CFO Dylan Smith said, noting that about 30% of his company’s business comes through them today.

“One of the kind of catalysts and things that we’ll be very focused on, and we see much more of an opportunity around going forward, is the sort of network” of system integrators (SIs), he said. In the past, SIs weren’t as “relevant” a type of a distribution partner for Box, but now Box can provide them with a “meaningful amount of work,” he said, adding that and “the continued focus on international are probably” among the “areas that you will see us evolve” in.