His keynote began predictably by addressing the shift in work style from hybrid work, but he did so through the lens of content. He set the stage well by revealing how much work has changed—people have moved from working in local teams to working with a wide network of people, digital processes no longer scale at work but at the core of work, data is scattered everywhere and that Automation, if done right, allows us to work more efficiently.
To help understand the role of content and how complex workflows can be, Levie describes the process of a company coming to market with a new shoe. He talked about the large amount of content that had to be handled by the same large number of people: project timelines, project plans, marketing documents, market studies, CAD diagrams, product images and more that both internal and external teams need to do. Then there are invoices, agency contacts, freelancers, contracts—the list goes on. That content spreads across products like Slack, ServiceNow, Webex, Zoom, Salesforce and other apps. Content is at the center of all workflows. The complexity of setting up and using all these content-driven workflows across different platforms—each different platform has its own set of security and compliance issues that add complexity and drive up costs—that’s what Box is trying to solve.
In some ways, Box before the pandemic may have been overdone for many companies and considered a “solution looking for a problem.” But then the problem came in a big way in the form of hybrid work and the corresponding, ever-expanding amount of unstructured content. Companies like Snowflake and Databricks do a great job of managing structured content, but unstructured content makes up 80% of a company’s data. The solution to managing the chaos of unstructured content is Box—not the “file sync and share” company that some might think, but the Box Content Cloud that addresses all aspects of the content lifecycle. This includes not only sharing content but securing, ingesting, classifying, publishing, signing and anything else that involves some data in some context, i.e. content.
During the analyst day, Box had several customers, whose names are under NDA, join us and talk about their experiences. I asked them if they wanted Box to be in the content creation space. Both stated that all of the content items are running on Box, and that they want the company to do more. It will be interesting to see how far Box takes its content creation capabilities. While I don’t see them coming out with a PowerPoint replacement, there’s definitely more work to be done here.
The company also jumped into deeper analytics with the release of Content Insights, which gives users a visual dashboard to measure the impact of content. Content Insights show who is using content, when it was accessed and by whom, allowing businesses to make better decisions. For example, an HR department can see who has and hasn’t read new company policies. An inside sales manager will have visibility into who on his team is using the new sales deck and who is using older versions. One of the more important aspects of Content Insights will be trending information and seeing how content usage changes over time, such as week or quarter. This can be used to make better decisions in the future. The content organizations create is their competitive differentiator, and Box provides insights to understand what works and what doesn’t. This is a new feature for Box, and I’m not sure if the product offers recommendations on what the insights mean, but it’s definitely an area for the company to expand on.
This content “platform” approach has several significant benefits for customers, one of which is cost reduction from vendor consolidation. When dealing with content, businesses can use Seismic for publishing, DocuSign for e-signature, Miro for whiteboarding, SharePoint for content management and more. With Box, a customer can get all the features from one vendor, but also have seamless interoperability between functions.
Integrating these functions is not the easiest task—as there are workflow and user issues. To help with this, Box created Box Consulting, a service that begins with a workshop phase to create a custom content integration plan and then an implementation phase to execute it. During the analyst event, Joe Klinker, Head of Solutions Marketing for Box, provided several customer examples and quantified the benefits. Los Angeles County Law Offices replaced 23 legacy content management solutions with Box alone and then used custom APIs with Salesforce to create a content platform to manage critical legal cases. Broadcom migrated 18 million files from its legacy system, eliminated all Windows-based servers and saved $10 million.
It will be interesting to see where Box takes its platform next. Ransomware recovery is one idea, but it can go deeper into content creation. The company recently moved its cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and this will increase the company’s agility and ability to roll out new features faster.
What I’m most interested in is how it becomes a broader platform. Today, Box integrates with every major software company—from Adobe to OpenText to Microsoft, and one would expect that. Box helps companies manage content so any software company in the content ecosystem should have integration with Box. They also work with ISV and SI partners for vertical apps. I asked Levie specifically about growing its ecosystem, and he mentioned a company called Crux that does asset management and contract management and uses the Box APIs to bring additional functionality to its product. Levie did mention a third category that they haven’t taken advantage of and that is corporate developers and small ISVs. All the big platform vendors, such as Microsoft and Salesforce have a huge ecosystem, most of which comes from this group. I know this is a focus area for Box, and if it’s going to be a real platform, it’s the next area it needs to grow.
Hybrid work currently lifts many boats, but there are no “gimmes” in the business world. Box took its product and continued to evolve it, and so it is now the best way for organizations to bring order to the chaotic world of content.