M+E Connections

Early adopters that are leveraging Box Platform and using the company’s application program interfaces (APIs) to build content applications are “spanning the gamut” across a wide variety of industries, Dominic Grillo, Platform solutions leader, said Jan. 18 during a Box webinar.

“We’ve had a lot of interest [from] industries that are more regulated and are familiar with the Box security story,” he said, adding that’s “driving a lot of interest and people are coming to us and having conversations about where we can fit in to a lot of these projects around digitization and extending business processes to customers and improving the customer experience.”

Although Box is “seeing interest across a whole subset” of industries, he pointed out that “a lot of the initial interest and people that are the furthest along, surprisingly, are some of the more regulated industries, like financial services and healthcare.” That trend has been interesting, he said, because those industries had traditionally been among the “late adopters when it comes to buying brand-new technology offerings.” So, the traditional pattern has “reversed itself,” he said.

Some customers using Box Platform for their apps have been using Box for a long time and it’s “part of the cornerstone of their content management strategy” and they’re “trying to consolidate all the different places that they store content in a single place, and then they’re trying to figure out how they can extract incremental value,” he said.

For those customers, one area of interest they have with Box Platform is “extending content to that last mile of their customer base,” he said. After all, he pointed out, “When you’re dealing with anything that’s customer-facing, you want to have complete control over not only the look and the feel of how you’re going to be interacting with those customers and how they’re going to be interacting with your business, but also the business process.”

Many customers are “envisioning an application that helps facilitate exchange of information and content directly with the customer,” he said. So, for example, if you are in the financial services industry, you might be envisioning an application to digitize the mortgage-lending process, he said.

Mike Schwartz, Box product marketing manager, asked why companies don’t just build their own applications. Grillo replied: “The barrier for entry to software development still remains relatively high,” and “not everyone has the expertise” to do it. The barrier to entry keeps declining, but the Box API platform is making it easier for Box customers to just “focus on the core experience” of the app they create, he said.

Solution engineers can be thought of as the “wizards of the Box Platform,” Grillo also said, adding: “We work really closely with our customers when they’ve got a project that’s going to be API-driven, and they’re evaluating all the different technologies that are going to be part of these custom apps.”

His team does “everything from advising people on architecture considerations of these apps down to actually building working prototypes and proof of concepts, so that there’s validation that Box is going to be a really great fit for the application before anything goes into production,” he explained.

Separately, Box said Jan. 19 that Stockholm-based production company Endemol Shine Nordics is deploying the Box cloud platform across the company. Endemol selected Box to “provide centralized and secure content management, both internally and externally,” Box said in a news release.