Connections

Box’s Patel: Business Models are ‘Shifting Quite Dramatically’

Companies are facing significant challenges today, whether they are in the technology sector or not, according to Jeetu Patel, SVP of Box Platform and the company’s chief strategy officer.

Content management services like the ones offered by Box are “fundamentally changing the way that people work,” he said during an Oct. 14 webinar. But “the way that people work isn’t the only thing that’s changing,” he said, adding: “What you’re starting to see is business models are fundamentally shifting quite dramatically.”

Fifty-two percent of the companies that were on the Fortune 500 in 2000 are “no longer on the list,” he went on to say. Furthermore, of companies on the original Dow Jones Industrial Average index, GE is the only company still there, he said, predicting that, over the next decade or so, about 75% of the companies on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index won’t be on that list anymore.

“The half-life of companies is shrinking,” along with their products, he said, adding that in just a few years, many of today’s companies will be facing rivals that don’t even exist now.

It would have been hard to imagine only seven years ago that the taxi cab industry would be “disrupted” — but it certainly is now thanks to companies including Uber, which has “fundamentally kind of changed the fabric of the transportation industry,” he said. There’s even been a ripple effect and other industries are being impacted by Uber’s success now also, he said, estimating that the company is valued at about $65 billion despite the fact that it doesn’t own any of the cars or many other assets that it uses. That’s more than most other transportation companies are worth combined, he said, adding Airbnb has had a similar impact on the hotel industry.

During the same webinar, Mike Schwartz, Box Platform product marketing manager, provided an update on some of the announcements that Box made during its BoxWorks conference in San Francisco last month.

The Box user interface (UI) kit “will be available over the next couple of months,” Schwartz said. The kit “allows us to leverage parts of the Box Web and mobile interfaces” to allow developers and customers “to bring that same kind of UI to their own applications,” he said, adding it allows customers to essentially “white label” Box in their own applications. That includes not just files and folders, but also the “actual interaction points,” including button placement, comment boxes and icons for different file types, he said. The kit will eventually be open sourced, so customers using it can “really customize and leverage the existing underlying technologies that we built here at Box in your own applications,” he said.

As also announced last month at BoxWorks, the company added HD video and virtual reality file support to its Box Platform.

Box UI kit components will be released throughout this year and early next year, Schwartz said. The first one, file preview, is available in beta now, featuring an interactive viewer for about 120 different file types, Schwartz said.

Box Platform folder metadata is also now available to customers, he said. Box Platform already offered metadata for file objects, which added more “context” on what any given file contained, but “a lot of our customers were asking for that same capability to be extended to folders,” he said.

Watermarking, meanwhile, was a “very common request” by customers when “dealing with any kind of proprietary or highly sensitive data,” he said, pointing out that’s been added also. The watermark displays a user’s name and time of access to help make sure info “doesn’t get into the wrong hands,” he said. That’s available now if “you’re building internal apps for managed Box users” and it will be extended to app users “sometime in Q4 of this year,” he said.

Applications for the incubator program that was announced last month by Box in partnership with Amazon Web Services started being accepted last week and there’s been a “huge amount of interest” so far, he went on to say. He added: “We’re evaluating applications now and we’ll be making decisions around that around the end of the month” or early November.