One on One with Aaron Levie of Box.net

Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net [1], which he originally created with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. He is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with the most effective elements of social business software. We asked him about his company's strategy and how well it incorporates into existing enterprise software.

FCM: Box.net started small as an online storage company, if I'm not mistaken. You have expanded your scope to include collaboration and formed many strategic partnerships. Was that a planned growth path or a strategy that developed over time?

AL: We launched in 2005 as a consumer-oriented online storage service, before "cloud" was even a buzzword. Initially our core mission was--and still is--to make it easy for people to access, collaborate and share all their content on the web. But our customers' usage of Box prompted our shift from online storage for consumers to a Cloud Content Management platform for business. Frustrated with the sharing limitations imposed by traditional enterprise software, people began using Box.net as a collaboration tool at work and spreading the service organically. Adoption began with individuals, growing to departments and finally full company deployment. So we've grown alongside our customers, retooling the Box platform into a sophisticated Cloud Content Management solution. Now we're focused on taking Box to the next level--continuing to add new features (we recently launched the ability for people to view all types of content from within any Box folder without needing to download), partnering with best-of-breed cloud services like Salesforce and Google Apps, and making the platform enterprise-ready with SAS70 certification [2].

FCM: How is online collaboration software like yours changing the way companies have traditionally worked (i.e., using a tool like Microsoft Office)?

AL: Traditional enterprise software is still rooted in the old desktop-centric paradigm, where users are limited by desktop software and discouraged from sharing 'beyond the firewall.' With Cloud Content Management, we're bringing the seamless content delivery experience of the web to the workplace, making it as easy to share documents and media with colleagues or business partners as it is to share a YouTube video or photo on Flickr. When traditional Enterprise Content Management software--such as Microsoft's Sharepoint--makes collaboration too difficult, users will simply go around the system. With Box, we're empowering users to collaborate, but also giving IT departments unprecedented visibility into how content moves within and beyond their organization. The Box platform enhances productivity and collaboration with flexible workflow, organic content discovery and trackable sharing, and also connects users to other best-of-breed cloud solutions through its OpenBox platform.

FCM: Your website lists some big corporate customers. How do you answer objections about security and reliability, especially from larger organizations?

AL: Security and downtime are serious concerns whether you’re dealing with the cloud or on-site services. But like all cloud vendors, our very existence hinges on our ability to protect companies' data and have as little server downtime as possible. Maintaining servers is just one of the many responsibilities of a typical IT department, but at Box.net, it is absolutely integral to our business and we take it very seriously. Transparency is essential and we're working toward SAS70 certification, which includes regular auditing by third parties on all aspects of security--from network firewalls to authentication policies to procedures for employee termination.

Storing business data in the cloud requires rethinking security, and we’re seeing a lot of innovative IT professionals begin to embrace this new approach, which in turn frees them up to focus on more strategic and business-critical technology initiatives. As you noted, we have customers who range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, all of whom see view Cloud Content Management as a more valuable, productive and secure way to manage their content.

FCM: Does your product work with existing content management solutions? If not, how can companies using your solution provide access to content in the cloud to other employees across the organization?

AL: Because of the low price-point and open, easy sharing, companies that implement Box can easily include any employee as well as external contractors and partners as needed within the Box environment. As the need to share grows, any individual can share content with additional people in the organization. If a company needs to integrate from existing server-based solutions, they can rely on the OpenBox platform for company specific integrations or enhancements to Box. Currently we are building additional integrations with cloud-solutions such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but the same process can be used with whatever existing systems are necessary.

FCM: Your website lists search as a key component to your solution, but can an existing enterprise search solution access Box content in an enterprise search product? How would this work?

AL: Currently, we don't open up Box content to outside enterprise search solutions. However, we will release our search API shortly so that others can build search applications around our content, or integrate search into certain workflows. While we understand the usefulness of an enterprise search solution that extends across many different applications within an enterprise, we also see the major benefits of integrated search that can build increasingly efficient algorithms that includes the metadata around the files as well as the text within.