On the heels of Box’s strong growth in 2011 — now at 8 million users and 100,000 businesses — and plans to offer the service to the Feds, comes another sign of the enterprise-cloud storage startup’s fast growth: it is moving into Europe.
Today the company is announcing a deal with Podio, a social business collaboration platform, to offer storage services to Podio customers.
Those customers today officially number at 40,000 but unofficially are “quite a lot higher” says a spokesperson. The company expanded to the U.S. last year and plans to give an update on growth in March.
Box has been around since 2005 but it is only more recently that the company’s business has really taken off — and so it makes sense for the company to put deeper roots into partnerships with international companies that can help the business grow more there.
Podio tells me that it is the first European partner for Box. Although technically Box already integrates with some 150 platform partners including those with international reach like Salesforce.com, Google, Jive and Yammer, this one more specifically will mean another social networking platform that Box can offer to its 8 million users.
Podio has been ramping up its partnerships at a faster rate of late: the Google partnership — to integrate the Podio platform with Google Docs — in fact was only announced a couple of weeks ago.
For Podio, a social network for businesses that lets those who use it create apps to enhance the functionality of the service (or a “Yammer with apps,” as we once called it) the deal gives its users another feature — cloud storage from a well-known brand — to add to the list already offered by other partners.
Those partners include Google Apps, Campaign Monitor, Evernote, FreshBooks, Instapaper and Zendesk.