M+E Daily

Box continues to see a large market opportunity and has set its eyes on several focus areas to drive growth, Aaron Levie, the company’s CEO, said Sept. 17, during an investor webcast held during the first virtual version of its annual BoxWorks conference.

During the BoxWorks Digital webcast, Levie also highlighted new enhancements to its core All-New Box cloud content management platform, Box Shield security service offering and Box for Microsoft Teams.

“We’re going after a really big market opportunity,” he told viewers, adding the company is “continuing to drive rapid innovation on our platform to make sure that we can address all of the use cases of our customers as they move content to the cloud.”

The company has adopted a Land, Adopt and Expand customer retention and growth strategy, Levie said. The key components of the Land portion of that strategy are: Box’s robust partnership ecosystem, digital acquisition engine growth in core international markets and key industries/vertical penetration, he noted.

The key components of Adopt, meanwhile, are: Accelerating deployment via consulting and customer success, delivering add-on products and high value use cases, and partnering with system integrators to embed deep integrations. And the key components of Expand are: Full platform capabilities through Box Suites, enterprise-wide deployments via Enterprise License Agreements, and “virality” through internal-external collaboration, Levie said.

Box’s expanded product portfolio, meanwhile, addresses a $55 billion market, Levie said. Three big focus areas for the company on the product front are making sure its offerings provide: “Frictionless” security and compliance, “seamless” internal/external collaboration and workflow, and the ability to integrate with all applications, he pointed out.

Box announced a new policy exception capability for Box Shield at BoxWorks Digital, saying the new capability, which must be opted-into at the corporate level, enables employees to make policy exceptions by providing business justification, which is then recorded for auditing purposes.  

The new capability is expected to be available to Box Shield customers next year, the company said.

On the Shield front, Levie focused on: the new Automated Classification capability that automatically detects personal identifiable information (PII) and custom terms in files; integration with Microsoft Information Protection (coming soon); and integration with the IBM QRadar enterprise security information and event management solution to collect Shield alerts (also coming soon).

New enhancements to the All-New Box experience that was announced in May include Annotations on mobile (for smartphones and tablets) that the company said at BoxWorks Digital are expected to start rolling out in late 2020, Levie said. With it, just like can already be done on the web, mobile users will now be able to simply select text or an image and leave a comment on the preview of a document, and Box will automatically create and send a push notification to collaborators alerting them to the new annotation, making it simple and fast to give and receive feedback on any device, according to the company.

It supports 36 file types, Levie noted. To make those free-form markups and text comments, also new is support for Apple Pencil, he said. Handwritten notes can automatically be converted to typed text with Apple Scribble so they can seamlessly be added to documents or text boxes, so users will no longer have to rely only on the built-in keyboard to share feedback, according to Box.

Also coming soon is Box App Gallery, which Levie noted allows users to easily find and install apps within the Box Web experience, quickly install Box integrations and discover new and featured integrations. The redesigned App Gallery is expected to become available in early 2021, Box said.

Levie also pointed to new enhancements to Box for Microsoft Teams. Key enhancements include the ability: for users to choose a Box folder to be synced automatically with a Microsoft Teams chat; to instantly grant access to Box files from within Teams; and to receive Box notifications related to content activity directly within Teams, he said. The enhanced Box and Microsoft Teams integration is expected to be generally available in October, Box said.

Box also announced new enhancements to Box Relay at BoxWorks Digital, including: Custom-built templates that it said customers can create, publish and manage themselves, making it easier to roll-out and standardize teams on common processes while incorporating workflow best practices; and new application programming interface (API) extensibility that allows customers to power cross-system business processes across the enterprise by connecting their workflows within Box to third-party applications including Salesforce, as well as their custom applications. Custom workflow templates in Box Relay will be generally available in November, and API extensibility will follow in January, the company said.

Also during the presentation, Box CFO Dylan Smith focused on how the company is “driving profitable growth.” Box is planning to double operating margin over the next three years, he told viewers.

While 96% of the company’s sales are now coming from recurring revenue through subscriptions, Box expects the services component of its business will “trend slightly upward” after the COVID-19 pandemic and “as we continue to sell larger and more strategic deals to our customers,” Smith said. Another plus: “We also don’t have much exposure to the industries that have been most heavily impacted by COVID-19,” he noted.