The cloud-based file-sharing and collaboration business continues to grow, inspiring competition between two heavy weights: Microsoft and Box. Last week, Box announced over $100 million in third quarter revenue growth despite competing with Microsoft’s OneDrive file share for SharePoint.
Aaron Levie, Box CEO and co-founder, believes that “the need for Box is clear; today, business content is spread across separate legacy systems, on-premises storage, disparate collaboration and workflow tools, and sync and share solutions.”
Recently, Box created new integrations with Office 365, including the ability to create, access, and edit Box content (like Excel files) in Office for Android. When asked about the partnership with Microsoft and Box in an interview with Redmond magazine, Levie indicated that “Microsoft has really transformed itself over the past couple years to being a much more partner-friendly and customer-friendly organization, realizing with billions of people on the Internet and on mobile devices, the market is so much bigger.”
Earlier this year, Box rolled out new security and governance features around a new offering called Box Governance. Box Governance allows organizations to meet data retention requirements and security classification. Levie says, “security is one of the key reasons why customers with go to Box.” Recent wins include a $500,000 deal from a multinational pharmaceutical company.
It remains to be seen whether C-level executives, such as chief information officers (CIO), chief information security officers (CISO), and chief information governance officers (CIGO) will buy into adopting Box throughout a company’s enterprise; however, one thing is for sure: cloud-based file-sharing and collaboration solutions are really changing the way businesses operate internally and with clients.
Can Box and Microsoft continue to coexist? We will have to wait and see, but its sure to be a fun ride.
