Tuesday 31 July 2012

BOX.COM launches in Europe


18 June – the team from BOX.COM are in London in advance of the announcement that they are expanding into Europe, in the first instance through a London base. BOX has (unashamedly) long been a favoured company for myself in that, whilst developed in a University dorm, it was designed from the outset to be an 'enterprise ready' rather than a 'consumer' product – (add your own names here). It will sync with corporate directories and the organisation retains control of all the content.
Previously described as 'ECM in the cloud' msmd advisors believes that BOX like Salesforce.com is taking a lead, in offering organisations an alternative to on premise proprietary solutions, whilst ensuring that corporate security strategy is adhered to. (It is notable that a little time before Microsoft announced it was to acquire the Yammer collaborative suite, and in msmd advisors' opinion, the Redmond behemoth was trying to address the same issue).
However, msmd advisors believes that BOX is a product of it's time. The 'perfect storm' of widespread wifi and broadband access across the world, the emergence of other form factors/devices, such as netbooks, tablets, Android and iOS phones as access devices, and the adoption of a increasing  range of standards for file formats has made this opportunity possible.
Alongside the expansion into Europe to support multinationals etc., BOX has added a whole range of extra tools to ensure differentiation from the 'cloud storage' competition.(again add your own names).
In addition BOX has used its rapid growth to date to recruit key industry individuals to support of its founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith, such as general mangers and marketeers (such as Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck from EMC, Joely Urton from Oracle, and Meghan Hughes from Text 100). These people are not only highly experienced and referenced, but all have significant influence n the market(s) that BOX it is aiming to penetrate. They also, like the founders, seem to have a delight in making business fun (which is something that is missing in many companies today). Welcome to this side of the pond.

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