Box CEO Aaron Levie: Our value-add tools will make us better than Dropbox and other rivals
Acquisition of 3D graphics firm Verold and partnership with Microsoft makes Box better than Dropbox, claims Levie
Box CEO Aaron Levie believes that his cloud-storage company can differentiate itself from competitors such as Dropbox in a very busy enterprise collaboration and storage software space, because it offers integrated tools that enable customers to "enrich" their organisations.
"Our overall philosophy is that we have to provide the best platform for where you're going to want to put your content and that is a moving target because what we can do on the internet is always changing," he replied in response to a question from Computing at the Box World Tour in London.
The event marked Levie's first visit to the UK since Box was given the green light to go public in January.
During the session, Levie spoke of Box's recent acquisition of cloud-based 3D graphics engine providers Verold, which will enable Box customers build and alter designs using cloud software without the need for a large file download.
"Anyone in engineering, manufacturing, product design, where you're working with large, complex 3D models and you don't want everyone in your team to have to download the files locally to be able to render that information, we're now going to be able to bring that to the cloud," said Levie, who described how it's a "representative example of where we're trying to take the platform".
"It's not just about storing the files or the sharing of files; it's about how we can enrich the experiences on content, no matter what industry you're in," he said. "In every industry, no matter what the unique assets which are worked on or shared, our job is to enrich those experiences and deliver new capabilities within Box."
Levie told Computing how tools like Verold "wouldn't have been possible two years ago", and that Box needs to continuously "up its game" in order to offer customers new ways to benefit from collaboration.
"The puck is always moving forward in terms of what's possible and it's our job to constantly provide that set of capabilities... [to] enrich content and information when it's in the cloud or in our environment," he said.
"We want to be the best place where you can collaborate, annotate, preview and, in some cases, manipulate content," Levie continued, before going on to explain how he also wants Box customers to be able to benefit from enterprise tools from other software vendors.
"We also want to be open enough to leverage other existing services where you might want to edit back and forth. So, we announced the partnership with Microsoft where you're going to be able to edit documents that are in Box within Office 365 on the web," he said.
"We're not going to control the entire experience, we're going to make sure that we're open enough and integrating to the other platforms and other services our customers are using. That is pretty fundamental for our proposition, which is again a strong focus on openness as a platform," Levie explained.
Levie also used the Box World Tour London event to set out how he believes that his firm is more suited to the enterprise than collaboration rivals Dropbox.
"Things like our enterprise key management, the compliance and security work we do, our partnership with Atos for helping customers with digital transformation, building solutions on Box for customers, we're just going way deeper from an enterprise standpoint [than Dropbox]," Levie told the audience.
"They have photo sharing products and email clients, while we're building up a platform for content, but it's for the enterprise. We can do a lot of things they can't focus on," he concluded.
However, Box's enterprise credentials have been questioned by rival collaboration software provider Intralinks. In an interview with Computing, president and CEO of Intralinks, Ronald Hovsepian, described Box as a "consumer-grade player".