M+E Connections

Box saw continued strong demand for its Box Shield security controls and intelligent threat detection capabilities in the fourth quarter (ended Jan. 31), according to company CEO Aaron Levie.

Shield is also “definitely one of the core catalysts” for Enterprise Suite “adoption, primarily because it’s a completely horizontal product [and] really every industry is facing challenges around data security,” he said Feb. 26 on an earnings call.

Shield is “already exceeding our expectations, growing faster at this point in its rollout than any other add-on product in our history,” he told analysts.

Overall, fiscal year 2020 was a “critical year” for the company in “fully building out our multi-product platform to address the broad needs of our nearly 100,000 customers and driving more efficient and profitable growth,” he told analysts.

During the past year, Box launched Shield and native workflow solution Box Relay, as well as hundreds of platform enhancements, he said.

Box also “expanded our integration partnerships with Microsoft, IBM, Splunk, Adobe, Google and many others to enable our customers to experience the full power of” the company’s platform, he told analysts.

He was referring in part to the general availability of a Box Shield and Splunk integration in Q4 that was designed to power automated threat detection and response, giving customers deeper visibility into content access patterns, Box said.

During Q4, the company also launched a new Box integration with Zoom, enabling users to easily share and collaborate on content in Box without having to leave the Zoom application, Box said.

In Q4, Box also introduced automated classification with Box Relay that it said allows customers to auto-apply pre-established classifications to content as an outcome of a Relay workflow and auto-trigger Relay workflows based on changes in content classification.

The company also released enhancements to the Box administration console that it said makes it easier for administrators to view and manage all of their applications integrated with Box or developed with Box in one place.

It also launched enhancements to Box Shield, including an updated dashboard, providing an easy visual summary of Shield alerts, and an improved end-user classification experience to help users understand the policies that will be enforced when classifying a file or folder, the company said.

In Q4, Box closed 112 deals greater than $100,000, up from 94 a year ago, as well as 14 deals over $500,000 versus 12 a year ago, and four deals over $1 million versus two a year ago, Levie said. An added plus was that more than 80% of Box’s $100,000 plus deals included at least one add-on product, he said.

“We remain excited by the size of the market we’re going after,” he went on to say, adding: “We’re in the best position to go after the tens of billions of dollars spent every year on content management, collaboration and security around content as it moves to the cloud. And these trends driving enterprises to move to the cloud are only accelerating. Every enterprise is going through significant digital transformation to better serve customers and employees.”

Box Q4 revenue grew 12% from a year ago to $183.6 million, above the high-end of its guidance, Levie said.