By Ron Miller and Molly Bernhart Walker

Last week, Box.net announced that former EMC Chief Marketing Officer Whitney Tidmarsh (who would hence forth like to be known as Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck) would join its team as Enterprise general manager. Box--a start up that's looking less small and start-up like by the second--has been steadily on the rise. Its ascent was punctuated by $48 million in venture funding in February and some impressive Q1 numbers.

It's not hard to see why Tidmarsh Bouck would want to get in on the action. FierceContentManagement had a chance to chat with Tidmarsh Bouck on April 15. We picked her brain on what the new opportunity means for her and what we may expect from Box as it allows this industry vet to get behind the wheel.

Ron Miller: What are you feeling in terms of culture shock? You were at EMC for 15 years and now you're in this much smaller organization. What's it like for you?

Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck: It's back to the future. It actually reminds me a lot of the early days of Documentum, which was about half the size Box is now, when I first joined. But it's been remarkably easy. I actually expected it to be a little bit more of a culture shock than it has been.

Often times bringing in a new executive with experience in a different kind of company can be a little bit daunting and I have to say everyone here has given me a ridiculously warm welcome--really just open arms and inviting me in and making sure that I'm coming up to speed, and frankly also picking my brain. So, it's been remarkably easy. And I have to say I really like wearing jeans to work everyday.

Molly Walker: Ron mentioned a change in culture, but your position has also changed. You were a CMO and now you're Enterprise GM. Maybe you could provide some insight into what your role is now and how that's different from what you were doing.

WTB: Interestingly enough, before I was the CMO at EMC, in the Information Intelligence group, I actually had been a general manager for a couple of years at Documentum, pre-acquisition. So, I had run two of the company's product lines at Documentum, both the web content management business as well as the classic document management business. Being a GM is not a totally foreign experience for me.

Clearly from one to the other is a fairly dramatic set of responsibilities and even more so, considering the GM role is here. We're much too small to have formal business units, but what we really needed was somebody to come in and be a catalyst or a lightning rod to pull together the strategy across product, marketing, services and sales.

The role I see is to really take what's already in flight and bring that together to form a much more identifiable and cohesive picture of what Box for the enterprise means. I'm enjoying the breadth of the role so far and I think it's going to be a lot of fun to really drive a whole sector of the business that's so important for our growth.

RM: What does Box need to do to really move into the enterprise in a big way? There are some pieces in place and certainly big holes that enterprise customers are going to want. How do you get Box from where it is today to where it needs to be, without adding a layer of complexity?

WTB: The last thing I want to do is try to turn Box into a Documentum. Documentum and its competitors are extremely good at what they do in addressing a scope of problems. It's foray into case management, for example, in solving some pretty decision-heavy, content-heavy types of applications, that is the sweet spot for [a company] like Documentum.

The sweet spot of Box is for-the-masses sharing and content management--and I don't necessarily say enterprise content management in the way Gartner and their peers use it. I think it really is content management along with all those things provided in a really simple, easy to use way.

There's been a little a bit of hope and frankly investment in thinking a Documentum, a SharePoint, a content manager or whatever could be rolled out to the masses for light-weight collaboration and knowledge management, as much as for those case management apps. I don't think that's proved wholly successful. I think there's a real opportunity to have both of those things in the enterprise that are complimentary, interconnected and can serve a different set of needs.

That said, Box does have some gaps to fill to meet those enterprise needs. I think Box has been pretty straight forward about saying what some of those gaps are, clearly being able to scale to tens of thousands of users, to hundreds of thousands, to millions, to billions of files. Those kinds of things have not been in the historic service-focus of Box because the primary customers have been individuals or small businesses or small departments. And so that's very clearly an area of investment and focus, ensuring that our operations, our cloud services are able to scale to the demands of the most demanding enterprises. That's probably, in my mind, the biggest focus in the near term.

MW: Looking to startups, you've been in the industry for a long time, have you seen some startups in the content management space go wrong? And considering Box is still relatively new on the scene how will you help them avoid those pitfalls, especially with your role as a metric-setter and measurer.

WTB: Startups are by nature nimble, able to make very quick decisions and really at the beginning don't really have a lot of infrastructure and process in place because it's not really needed in the small scale of a very tiny company.

I'm actually, really pleasantly surprised at the amount of process that Box already has in place around making sure that we're communicating well across the functions of the company, making sure that we're thoughtful about tradeoffs, product decisions and how we put features in place, and at what extent.

I think one of the failures of lots of startups is to not think about how to put foundations in place to grow at scale. And again, I'm pleased to see Box is already thinking about a lot of that, but certainly I think my expertise will only add to that area.

I think a lot of startups fail because they end up growing very quickly because they get an influx of investment and just lose track of stuff. It's just too hard to put the systems in place after the fact, when you've already grown three or four times the 20 employees that got you off the ground. So that is something I think is really important and, so, a level of rigor without bureaucracy is certainly important.

MW: I was curious about the opportunity for partnerships. Given that you're so established in the market, what do you think you'll be able to bring to Box with those opportunities.

WTB: Obviously, from my role, the one that's most interesting to me, day-to-day is the enterprise partnership. It's pretty fun to see what we're doing around things like Samsung, and BlackBerry, and Android. There are already some pretty meaty partnerships happening in the enterprise realm so obviously Salesforce.com is a good partner of ours and we've got a bunch of other things cooking with others. The cloud connect announcement that we made at info360 was clearly an indicator of our desire to work with the enterprise content management players and we do quite a lot in that same vein with SharePoint as well as some other ECM guys.

There are some other pretty exciting partnerships in the works that will come to light in the course of the next four to five weeks.

There are an awful lot of things that we could do with EMC, with VMware and all their cloud initiatives. Some of the cloud storage systems that EMC has to offer and obviously continuing the partnership with Documentum around the cloud connect capabilities. So, I think there's a lot more to come and I haven't even had a chance to put any finger prints on that yet. But I hope to.

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