Fresh off a $48 million funding round, cloud storage and collaboration startup Box.net is launching a new product today that should further its presence in the enterprise space. The company is debuting ECM Cloud Connect, which acts as a bridge between on-premise enterprise content management systems and Box.net’s cloud platforms.
Box.net CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells us that while there are traditional software and systems to manage on-premise data within organizations, Box wants to help introduce cloud version of of this with ECM Cloud Connect. Here’s how it works. Box is partnering with EntropySoft to offer businesses a peice of software will sit behind firewall and will connect to both on-premise solutions and Box, acting as a bridge between the two platforms.
Once connected, ECM Cloud Connect will automatically synchronize data between any enterprise content management system (like SharePoint) and Box. Businesses can then migrate specific content to the cloud, and seamlessly archive it back to any internal infrastructure, all while keeping the same folder structure, permissions, and version history
(metadata support will be coming soon, says Box).
ECM Cloud Connect will also allows users to archive content automatically or on-demand from Box and will also allows users to easily migrate content to and from on-premise systems to Box’s cloud.
Users of the new offering also can access Box from any location, on any device, including desktop, laptop, smartphone, and tablet. Box also allows users to invite users to a shared workspace in the cloud with a secure web link and users can view and play content directly in the browser, including images, audio, video, and programming files.
So why would an company want to use ECM Cloud Connect? Levie says that for companies that have not yet migrated fully to the cloud, this offering gives them the best of both world in terms of having an on-premise system and the choice of migrating specific content to the cloud. This gives companies who may have been hesitant about transitioning fully to the cloud, a hybrid solution.
Of course, Microsoft Sharepoint has both an on-premise offering as well as a cloud-based platform, which achieves some of what ECM Cloud Connect aims to do. But Levie maintains that Microsoft’s offerings are clunky and Box’s ease of use and simplicity makes the platform more ideal for enterprise customers who want a hybrid infrastructure.
Currently, Box has 60,000 companies using its cloud platform, including 73 percent of the Fortune 500. EMC Cloud Connect could bring in a number of new enterprise customers who are on the fence about moving data to the cloud.