BoxWorks 2015: Box sheds more light on ties to IBM, AWS and AT&T
SAN FRANCISCO---Following up a string of new apps and announcements on Tuesday, Box unveiled more nitty gritty updates tied to some of its more prominent alliances -- namely IBM.
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Amid the enterprise cloud company's annual BoxWorks show on Wednesday, the two tech brands introduced a quartet of new products for enterprise content management and collaboration, starting with StoredIQ, a data analytics service designed for joint customers, allowing them to migrate existing on-premise content to the cloud using smart classification.
Pitched toward legal and finance customers, StoredIQ taps into unstructured data wherever it resides for providing insights.
IBM and Box are bringing their clouds closer together through the IBM Content Navigator with Box, allowing users to search content across on-premise and Box environments with a single, integrated view.
Joint customers can also share content through IBM Datacap with Box, allowing users to capture and digitize content, such as paper copies, and store that information on Box.
For current and non-customers alike, IBM Case Manager with Box is meant to open up sharing possibilities, allowing external users to share and receive content on any device through Box, while internal users can remain in a case environment.
IBM Content Navigator and StoredIQ with Box are both available starting today. Case Manager and Datacap are scheduled to roll out later this year.
Beyond IBM, Box is also reaching out to Amazon Web Services, expanding its own Enterprise Key Management service for placing encryption key management in customer hands to support the new Amazon Web Services Key Management Service.
Box is also laying the groundwork for letting users pick their network connections to the Box platform, scheduling launches for this function with AT&T Netbond and NTT later this year.
The Los Altos, Calif.-based company is also bolstering security on the Box platform through Device Trust, validating a specific device's security posture before authorizing end-user access from that device to content in Box, and Legal Holds, a new feature coming to Box Governance next year that lets users put a hold on content stored in Box, preventing changes or the deletion of content during an ongoing case.
These updates follow up Tuesday's debut of Box Capture, an iOS-only mobile app connecting a user's camera directly to the Box platform, as well as the new developer and enterprise editions of the Box Platform for building enterprise apps.
Earlier on Wednesday, Box CEO Aaron Levie sat down with Cisco chairman John Chambers, who spoke to the necessity of adapting to technological transitions and forging more industry collaborations.
For Cisco, a major new partnership that might have been unthinkable a few years ago came to fruition this year. That would be Apple, and the iPhone maker's CEO, Tim Cook, also appeared on stage at BoxWorks this week.
During the opening fireside chat with Levie, Cook divulged tidbits about why the successful consumer technology company is making a more concerted pitch toward the enterprise market now.
"What we don't bring is we don't have deep knowledge of all the verticals that the enterprise deals with," Cook said at the time. "So to do great things we need to partner with other people. This is all about giving a suite of applications to the enterprise so we can really change how people work."
Chambers also praised Apple and Cook for what could have been an all-but-impossible transition after the Steve Jobs era, briefly touching on the recent integrations between Cisco and Apple on mobile enterprise products for iOS.
"He clearly gets it," Chambers chirped. "Watch strategic partnerships. Most of them won't work, but those that do will change the industry in a big way."
Image via Box