M+E Daily

The explosion we’ve seen in the number of apps, services and tools in recent years has caused a major issue with content fragmentation, where siloed app data and multi-clouds are overwhelming any attempt to untangle the chaos, according to Box.

“What we see across our customer base and really across the world is that digital transformation has never been more urgent for businesses,” Tracy Gao, product marketing manager at Box, said Wednesday during the webinar “Work the way you want: Introduction to Box integrations.”

She pointed to what’s different today than years past. For one thing, “businesses need to operate faster than ever” now, she said, adding: “The hyper-competitiveness of our markets demand that we have a greater reliance on a global partner network and that we get more products to market more quickly. But, at the same time, customers expect frictionless, responsive experiences from any company that they deal with, no matter what industry they’re in.”

Turning to the second major difference today that’s become apparent, she said “workplace technology can either make or break productivity of an employee and even the organization at large,” adding: “Employees want to be able to work with modern tools but team collaboration in most organizations is still relatively cumbersome. At the same time, we’re seeing that employee satisfaction is really driven by the engagement of the technology that people are using and their ability to leverage best-of-breed tools to get work done.”

At the same time that “we’re dealing with all this transformation in how we work, we know that the risk of cyberthreats and regulations are growing constantly” also, she pointed out.

“We have more and more high value intellectual property that’s flowing across the extended enterprise, but attacks are more frequent and harder to defend on our own,” she said, adding that global data privacy regulations, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly complex. “So, if you’re doing business globally, you have to think about things like” the General Data Protection Regulation that went into effect in Europe last year and industry-specific regulations, she told listeners.

“What we’re seeing is that content is actually at the center of all these challenges,” she went on to say, explaining that whether you’re in client services, human resources, marketing, operations, R&D or sales, “you’re dealing with different types of content every day that require internal and external collaboration.”

Complicating matters is that the “shift to the cloud has driven us to a place with many different clouds,” she said, noting we’re seeing more vendors that have started providing services in the cloud or have migrated their offerings there. Many organizations are leveraging cloud offerings, while many still have legacy technology sitting on-prem, she noted.

And all the separate siloes that organizations are using, meanwhile, tend to have unstructured data and content that must be managed, connected, accessed and secured, she said.

Most companies are also using multiple cloud solutions for their data and these disparate systems “can lead to massive fragmentation” when unchecked, she noted, adding “this problem is only getting worse.” After all, organizations use an average of 1,181 cloud services to run their businesses – 95 of them for collaboration alone, she told listeners.


All those different siloes can lead to fragmentation, and that can cause a disjointed user experience that includes inefficient processes and workstreams, duplicate and outdated content, manual and time-consuming tasks, and increased multitasking, according to Box. Context switching, meanwhile, can ultimately lead to an up to 40% decline in productivity, Gao said.

Existing technologies can’t solve all these problems and what organizations need is one platform in the cloud – like Box — that can bring together all the content moving in and out of their applications, she pointed out.

Noting that Box’s “mission is to power how the world works together,” she said
Box has worked with more than 90,000 companies across multiple industries, including 69% of Fortune 500 companies. One of the key advantages of Box is its partner ecosystem that includes “best-of-breed integrations” with apps including Salesforce, Office 365 and Slack, Box says.