Box.Net: Simplicity, the Cloud & Taking on SharePoint

By Rikki Endsley (@rikkiends) Nov 23, 2011

At one time, when professionals thought of sharing and collaboration, Microsoft's SharePoint stood out as the standard solution. These days, the extensive features of SharePoint might also give its competition the upper hand, particularly in the cloud. At least that's what Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net, thinks.

"The vision around Box is that we want to make it incredibly easy for people in businesses to share, manage, and get to their content from anywhere," Levie tells CMSWire. "Box does this by delivering a cloud solution that can be accessed from any mobile device — iPad, iPhone, Android — integrated into nearly any application you're using (Salesforce, Netsuite, etc.), and used across organizations."

Levie says that the reason Box has more than seven million users and 77% of the Fortune 500 using it is that it provides an enterprise-secure and scalable solution, while still keeping the product simple for individuals to use.

Mobile, Integration Key to the Box Strategy

The market is fairly fragmented and nascent at the moment, but we don't see many vendors doing exactly what we're doing," Levie says. "SharePoint is the most widely used and known solution in the space, now moving to the cloud, but most customers are limited by SharePoint's complexity and lack of mobility offerings. We believe this is a multi-billion dollar market, and we're just in the early stages of it right now."

Box is mastering mobile and consolidating different content management solutions, letting users gain access to and manage their content from a browser, however they choose to get there — while sitting at a desk, working on an iPad or via an iPhone or Blackberry. And it plays well with others, which it recently demonstrated with its new integration with Yammer. But if Levie has his way, Microsoft will embrace the cloud and unlock Office 365.

Box already connects with Salesforce, Google Docs, Jive, EMC, Netsuite and others. When it comes to connecting with Microsoft, Levie says, "We’d love to connect Box to their online office suite just as we have with Google Docs. Because at the end of the day, we want customers to have the opportunity to choose the solutions that work best for them. And we’re betting that those solutions will be open, mobile and fundamentally simpler than ever before."

Being Small Has Its Advantages

Levie has good news for startups: Being the new, little guy can actually work in your favor. He says that we instinctively expect big companies to take over the market, but their size can render them nearly defenseless against more agile competitors. And he should know. Box has come a long way since Levie and his partner, Dylan Smith, founded the company in a dorm room in 2005.

With US$ 81M in the coffers, Box is focusing on new server infrastructure, expanding its staff and increasing R&D. In Box's case, being the new guy means it's faster and more mobile, in more ways than one. The company is embracing the mobile market, with native apps for Android smart phones, iPhone, iPad and Blackberry, and a redesigned mobile site using the HTML5 standard.

And Box is not actively targeting the enterprise developers with its new Developer Network. The plan is to host developer communities and platform partners under one roof, all with the ultimate goal of showing Microsoft how it's really done. Of course, Box has a long way to go if it's going to seriously take on the SharePoint partner/developer ecosystem.