Boxworks 2014: Box For Industry To Offer Vertical Cloud Services

Box is to offer industry-specific packages of services and applications in an effort to attract more businesses to its cloud platform.

Box for Industry will combine the cloud firm’s collaboration, security, storage and metadata tools with applications created by third-party developers.

A number of sectors will be targeted including education, advertising, energy, construction and legal, but the service will initially be offered to companies in the retail, healthcare and media and entertainment industries.

Box for Industry

“Every business in traditional environments are re-imagining what they need to do and to help customers,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie at the company’s Boxworks event in San Francisco.

He explained how each service is tailored to each industry’s needs, so Box for Retail will focus around vendor collaboration, digital asset management and retail store enablement.

This, Box says, will allow retailers to work better with external suppliers, enhance advertising campaigns and provide in-store staff with the same customer information as their online store. In comparison, Box for Healthcare centres on security, privacy and mobile devices to help improve patient care.

Doctors can annotate pictures or x-rays and share them with other medical staff, or with an approved external researcher, securely. Box says its services will become increasingly important as more connected devices enter medical environments.

Levie said he was confident that the focus on vertical products would not mean its core service is neglected, explaining it was part of the company’s bid to establish Box as a platform, not just a storage service. He used the number of applications built using Box’s APIs as evidence of this, adding that Box for Industry just wouldn’t be possible without the developer ecosystem.

As part of this wider platform push, Box also used Boxworks to announce a number of new collaboration features, including Office 365 integration, and the release of Box Workflow.

How much do you know about the cloud? Try our quiz!