Last week Box.net announced big changes to its cloud storage offerings, increasing the amount of storage across all three service tiers--free, business and enterprise. The big news, however, was the new unlimited storage offering for Enterprise. The changes are as follows:

• Free service goes from 1GB to 5GB of free storage.
• Business class users get a flat 500 GB instead of charging per user. Box.net CEO Aaron Levie says this means that Business users now have 500 GB to use across all the users in the plan. "Instead of our customers paying to incrementally increase storage for each user (15GB), we're now starting the Business plan out at 500GB of shared storage, with no individual-user limits," Levie says.
• The new Enterprise levels give unlimited storage, meaning that a large organization can store all of their content in the cloud, although the overall monthly fee is based on a per seat cost.

Levie says the Enterprise plan starts at $35/user/month, with a minimum of 20 seats, and Box discounts at scale for large deployments. He believes that this takes storage concerns out of the equation. "We're offering unlimited storage for Enterprise customers because we believe that storage should never be a concern for end users and IT administrators--instead, we want them to be able to focus on all the collaboration and sharing activities surrounding content."

It begs the question, though: How can they offer this and still turn a profit? Levie says the company is able to do it by taking advantage of the efficiencies it has built into the data center over the years. "We've experienced massive efficiencies in our own infrastructure (5X storage density improvements in the past four years, for instance), and we're trying to pass along those continuous advancements to our customers."

He acknowledges that there will be many customers that have "extreme" storage needs and will be more costly to service, but he says, "we'll be able to profitably support the vast majority of use cases with our unlimited plan."

For now, it takes the amount of content out of the equation for most business users, but if big customers come on board and take advantage, it will certainly be a challenge to Box.net to keep up.

For more information:
- see Aaron Levie's blog post 

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