LeWeb 2012: Box Announces Major UK Expansion

Enterprise cloud storage company Box has announced its first international headquarters – in London – the LeWeb event has been told.

A spokesperson for the company told TechWeekEurope at LeWeb conference in Westminster this morning that it plans to hire 100 people to work across Europe by the end of 2013.

“We grow quickly,” the spokesperson said. The company already has a big customer here in the UK – telecoms operator O2. “They run some apps on our platform, which they use for shiny presentations to their customers,” the spokesperson added.

The company also supplies Heathrow operator BAA with some cloud storage services.

Why London?

In a blog post on the Box website, the vendor explained it was expanding across the world due to the rapid uptake of its services outside of the US where it is headquartered.

“Why Europe … and why now? The biggest factor is that we’ve seen tremendous adoption in Europe over the past year. Our customer base in Europe has doubled over the last year, and overall, 50 percent of traffic to Box comes from users outside the United States,” Box said.

“That’s very exciting, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. CIOs across Europe and the rest of the globe are looking for solutions that are intuitive for users, while also providing IT with a scalable, secure platform to manage all their information.

“With people on the ground in Europe, we’ll be able to better support existing customers there and accelerate Box adoption in new organisations.”

Box is also looking to set up shop in Ireland, France and Germany. It hasannounced an extended partnership with HP to bring Box services to small and medium-sized businesses.

Box’s big sell is its ability to scale and the security it can offer, the spokesperson said. The company secures all information it stores with 256 bit encryption and can scale to hundreds or thousands of users fast, he added.

It charges £11 per user, per month for its Business package, which the spokesperson described as “competitive”. On that option, companies are limited to a maximum of 500 users and 1000GB  of cloud storage.

For the Enterprise service, which offers an unlimited number of users and as much storage as you need, customers have to speak to Box about pricing.

There is also a free service for single users, which provides up to 50GB.

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