Box Looks To The Collaborative Future

Online storage firm Box has lifted the lid on how it sees the future of enterprise software developing, revealing that it sees collaborative working as the key for many businesses.

Speaking at the Business Without Boundaries event in London yesterday, Box CEO Aaron Levie highlighted how the company has grown significantly as it approaches its tenth birthday.

Box now boasts 27 million users, including 240,000 businesses, across the world, but Levie also revealed that the company itself had grown, as it now has 47,000 developers working across its offerings.

All change

Levie (pictured left) highlighted how far the business world had changed in the years since Box started, with mobile and collaborative working now the norm for many companies.

There are now 1.75bn mobile phones across the world, Levie said, meaning that businesses can now connect to and be contacted by their customers wherever they are, whilst also opening up a whole new customer base for the company’s products.

But this change has meant many businesses need a wide-ranging platform which can work on any device – a shift to what Levie calls a “user-centric” approach, as the disparity between how people work and what traditional enterprise software can do reaches a new high.

New focus

As many companies adopt BYOD schemes and collaborative working, businesses face a challenge concerning not just their employees’ productivity, but also issues around security and control.

Box wants to make organisations, “more productive, competitive and collaborative”, Levie told the crowd, as the company looks to help its customers adapt to how the IT industry has a whole is now beginning to put users at the centre of the technology strategy.

Many businesses are now rethinking “the entire IT paradigm” and embracing a shift from being system centric to user centric, Levie said.

Levie was keen to highlight how this shift could be facilitated by Box For Industries, the company’s new set of solutions announced at its BoxWorks event last month. This allows for the building of specially tailored apps for businesses across a wide range of industries, from healthcare to media, and is a crucial part of ensuring companies provide beneficial experiences for their customers or users.

“We’re entering an era of unprecedented business transformation,” Levie said, “Every single industry is transforming because of technology!”

“Never before has IT innovation been so closely tied to business transformation,” Levie said, noting that for many companies, their customer experiences now all come back to their IT capabilities.

“This is an amazing time to be in IT”.

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