M+E Daily

Box is looking play a “disruptive” role in the still-nascent electronic signature market with Box Sign, its new e-signature capability that will be natively embedded in the Box platform at launch this summer, according to Aaron Levie, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

“I think we’re still in the very early innings in this category,” he said June 23 during the Q&A of an investor webcast hosted by William Blair & Co.

He declined to comment on the competition that Box Sign will specifically provide to DocuSign in the category.

But he said most Box customers are “still pretty early in their signature journey,” explaining: “They may have invested in an signature platform for one part of the organization. They might want to be able to expand that more broadly. And then you have entire categories of customers that haven’t yet invested in the space yet. So we see a tremendous amount of upside as being a new entrant in this market and, of course, we’re going to be very disruptive in our business model and our pricing.”

When the company first announced Box Sign, “I probably got the most amount of instant feedback from CIOs of any new feature we’ve ever released,” he noted.

Earlier in the webcast, he said: “We’ve had really resounding feedback from customers around where we’re going to be taking Box Sign.”

Box Sign is a “great example of where we’re trying to drive a disruptive business model in the market,” he said, explaining: “Our overall pricing and packaging strategy is really to do three things. One, be able to make it really easy for customers to deploy Box more broadly in their organization…. Second, we want to be able to continue to improve our price per seat…. And the way that we do that is making sure we’re adding more value to our offering and differentiating the plans with more value. And then, finally, we want to increase our net retention rate.”

Although Box Sign will be included in all Box business plans, he said: “There’ll be additional features that are separated by plan type. So customers that have some of our higher-end enterprise plans will have more functionality than customers just using our starter or business editions.”

Box Sign will “be able to power the complete e-signature workflow, starting with document preparation, where it’ll work with all major file types that you’d want to get signed,” he explained.

“We have deep e-signature workflows that will be built in” and “we’re going to have a really powerful set” of application programming interfaces (APIs), and that is “something we’re extremely excited about,” he said.

Box Sign will support “native e-signature in Box for any kind of e-signature workflow when you’re inside of our user interface but we’re also going to have powerful APIs so you can embed Box Sign into third-party applications” also, he noted.

Box, meanwhile, will also be “doubling down on our” Microsoft partnership, he said. To that end, Box is “advancing how we integrate with Office 365 [and] Microsoft Teams, and we are seeing tens of thousands of enterprises deploying Box alongside the Microsoft stack,” he said.

As part of that partnership, “all-new integrations… have been rolling out with Microsoft Teams [and] we have exciting advancements happening with Microsoft Office,” he noted. And that is “just scratching the surface of the kind of ways that we’re integrating with Microsoft,” he said.

Box has also been “making similar advancements with other major platforms,” he said. As an example, he pointed out that Box recently announced new integration with ServiceNow to modernize legal workflows.