Box.net’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie has been open about his belief that mobile is a key pillar to the cloud storage company’s future. The company already offers native apps for a number of platforms, including Android, iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, but the company’s mobile site was lacking in functionality. Which is why Box has completely re-developed its mobile site, and is launching HTML5 mobile offering and debuting apps for Android tablet and BlackBerry PlayBook devices.
For background, Box, which has 6 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.
And now many Box clients wants to access much of the functionality listed above on mobile devices. Levie tells us that Box has seen a 600 percent increase in enterprise sales coming from companies that want mobile deployments. And Box has 1 million users across ioS, Android, and other mobile apps. Levie says that the mobile site is actually the most used mobile offering in the Box mobile family.
The HTML5 site is now more interactive, and includes automatic page refresh, commenting functionality, updated search, a new UI, and is altogether faster than the previous site. Users can also access and view files and folders and share content to co-workers and contacts.
The company is also launching new apps for the Android Tablet and BlackBerry PlayBook.
After talking to Levie briefly about Box’s new offerings, it’s very apparent that he’s bullish on mobile for the enterprise. “If you visited our offices today, every third word uttered by employees at Box has to do with our mobility strategy,” he says. “I see mobility has an inflection point for cloud computing and we want to make sure we are at the center of that.”
After starting as a college business project in 2005, Box was officially launched in March of 2006 with the vision of connecting people, devices and networks. Box provides more than 8 million users with secure cloud content management and collaboration. They say their platform “allows personal and commercial content to be accessible, sharable, and storable in any format from anywhere”.
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