So take a look at my musings, I was joined by fellow colleague Alan Lepofsky at the conference - and here in the video): (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)
No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
Want to read on? Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – here are my Top 3:
Box is a viable business – Not too many years ago there was a concern that the File Synch & Share market would get commoditized, and players like e.g. Box being squeezed out by the entrance of larger players like e.g. Microsoft or Google. Today we can say that this concern has not materialized, and Box is on the path to become a 100M / quarter enterprise vendor, having turned around the potential threats into partners / frenemies / co-opetitors: Both Microsoft (with Peggy Johnson) and Google (with Diane Greene) were on stage with partnership announcement. Quite a remarkable turnaround.
Product Innovation in the core – One of the reasons why Box is doing well is that the vendor is (more than I have seen in the past) actively working on improving the core product. A new user interface is available (finally) and addresses a number of usability concerns many have been vocal before. The new UI feels less clunky and is more in synch with 2016 UI best practices (e.g. dynamic re-sizing). The collaboration on Box Notes will be improved. The most prominent announcement though was the new Relay product – that in conjunction with IBM – will bring light workflow capabilities to the Box product, something Box has been missing (and / or avoiding?) for a long time vis a vis long entrenched workflow / document vendors like EMC’s Documentum, Opentext and others.
Product Innovation with Box Platform – The newly unveiled Box Platform, that enables developers to build content centric applications is off to a strong start, with over 80k developers, 2k apps and most interestingly 50% of APIs calls of Box overall. The last statistic shows that there was demand for building content centric applications in the market and the Box install base. From a load / platform perspective Box would be only half the vendor it is today, something few may notice today, but has severe (positive) effects in the medium run. With the additional platform load Box not only gets more customers and users, but also gets better economies of scale to operate its platform and last but not least gets more of an interesting partner for large cloud vendors (no surprise AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM were there – on stage and as sponsors).
But developer adoption does not come by itself, so it is good to see that the Box Platform team is focused on developer experience – which first and foremost starts with developer productivity. Building content centric apps is not trivial from a user experience, so providing controls with the Box UI toolkit is key for developer productivity, as well as an important decision criterion to use Box as a platform. Box has also done work for new media (360-degree video e.g. from drones featured prominently) – and expanded its native viewer capabilities, that are key to keep a seamless user experience. And when applications have been built, they need to be operated and maintained, the new Box Developer Console is a good version one product to address this… And documents often have legal ramification, so apart from Box Zones (available since earlier this year), making available compliance APIs is another key step the Box Platform team has taken to make it easier for developers to address the pesky and tedious compliance questions.
On the concern side there was little progress and announcement on the machine learning side. As an overall trend the intelligence permeates the LCD, which means the intelligence and the actor is not the human anymore – but the software behind it. In many cases today already, software is the better ‘driver’ for content than humans, it is cheaper, never sleeps, does not make mistakes, and if programmed correctly is bias free. We got a glance in a presentation of the ‘future of content management’, it is good to see Box is seeing all the trends, next will be to get them on the product roadmap. It also has some existing partners who are strong in the space (all mentioned above). Sharing documents into the overall business data maelstrom on Hadoop is another area where Box needs to spend some thought (and potential product development) cycles. Lastly Box Zones is a key step forward, but like with all other SaaS vendors, the multi-spliced-multi-location problem is still unsolved. Letting customers select their favorite location is not a medium term viable solution.
For Box customers these are all welcome developments, the new UI certainly having the most immediate, direct impact. Watching the developments around Relay will be a key area for customers to follow – and to consider which workflow around documents may be moved to Box. Equally customers and prospects who are looking at building their own content centric apps have plenty to use and more to come for them. There is little concern at the moment that developers cannot build very powerful content centric next generation applications on the Box Platform, a key value proposition today. Coupled with Box Zones this makes Box also a good partner for global use cases.
Finally it was refreshing to hear a vendor speak so openly about technical debt and how to actively address this phenomena which is part of all software development, but seldom addressed so openly and directly. Good to see, and kudos to the Box team to have the courage to openly talk about the challenge.
Overall encouraging progress and signals from BoxWorks. Stay tuned.
P.S. Checkout Alan Lepofsky's event report here he has the content, collaboration and social angle.
More on Box
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here). (The Day #1 Storify is here - the Analyst Day is here).
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
But developer adoption does not come by itself, so it is good to see that the Box Platform team is focused on developer experience – which first and foremost starts with developer productivity. Building content centric apps is not trivial from a user experience, so providing controls with the Box UI toolkit is key for developer productivity, as well as an important decision criterion to use Box as a platform. Box has also done work for new media (360-degree video e.g. from drones featured prominently) – and expanded its native viewer capabilities, that are key to keep a seamless user experience. And when applications have been built, they need to be operated and maintained, the new Box Developer Console is a good version one product to address this… And documents often have legal ramification, so apart from Box Zones (available since earlier this year), making available compliance APIs is another key step the Box Platform team has taken to make it easier for developers to address the pesky and tedious compliance questions.
MyPOV
A good event for Box, that not only has reached critical mass but also is progressing well at creating the ‘2nd leg’ with the Box platform. It is early days, but good progress and promising new capabilities are in the pipeline. Things will look (even) better for Box once those will be delivered over the next quarters.On the concern side there was little progress and announcement on the machine learning side. As an overall trend the intelligence permeates the LCD, which means the intelligence and the actor is not the human anymore – but the software behind it. In many cases today already, software is the better ‘driver’ for content than humans, it is cheaper, never sleeps, does not make mistakes, and if programmed correctly is bias free. We got a glance in a presentation of the ‘future of content management’, it is good to see Box is seeing all the trends, next will be to get them on the product roadmap. It also has some existing partners who are strong in the space (all mentioned above). Sharing documents into the overall business data maelstrom on Hadoop is another area where Box needs to spend some thought (and potential product development) cycles. Lastly Box Zones is a key step forward, but like with all other SaaS vendors, the multi-spliced-multi-location problem is still unsolved. Letting customers select their favorite location is not a medium term viable solution.
For Box customers these are all welcome developments, the new UI certainly having the most immediate, direct impact. Watching the developments around Relay will be a key area for customers to follow – and to consider which workflow around documents may be moved to Box. Equally customers and prospects who are looking at building their own content centric apps have plenty to use and more to come for them. There is little concern at the moment that developers cannot build very powerful content centric next generation applications on the Box Platform, a key value proposition today. Coupled with Box Zones this makes Box also a good partner for global use cases.
Finally it was refreshing to hear a vendor speak so openly about technical debt and how to actively address this phenomena which is part of all software development, but seldom addressed so openly and directly. Good to see, and kudos to the Box team to have the courage to openly talk about the challenge.
Overall encouraging progress and signals from BoxWorks. Stay tuned.
P.S. Checkout Alan Lepofsky's event report here he has the content, collaboration and social angle.
More on Box
- Event Preview - What Alan Lepofsky and I want Box to address this BoxWorks [2015] - read here
- Event Report - Pivotal SpringOne Platform - Spring in its 2nd spring - read here
- Event report - AWS Enterprise Summit 2016 Frankfurt - The German Road to Cloud adoption is ... long - read here
Event Report - SAP Insider Vienna - HCP, BI and SuccessFactors are the takeaways - read here
Event Report- Alteryx Inspire 2016 - Enabling change agents in data management - read here
Event Report - Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry Summit - It's good to be king of PaaS - read here
Event Report - Google I/O 2016 - Android N soon, Google assistant sooner and VR / AR later - read here
Event Report - Infosys Confluence - The Future Watch is Software + People - read here
Event Report - Microsoft Build 2016 - A platform vision and plenty of tools for next generation applications - read here
Event Report – Google Google Cloud Platform Next – Key Offerings for (some of) the enterprise - read here
Progress Report - Cloudera grows product, verticals and globally - now needs to execute - read here
Progress Report - Hortonworks wants to become the next generation for the enterprise – a tall ask - read here
Progress Report - Oracle Cloud - More ready than ever, now needs adoption - read here
Progress Report - Workday Tech Summit - Good Progress, More Insights, Less Concerns - read here
Event Report - Oracle Openworld 2015 - Top 3 Takeaways, Top 3 Positives & Concerns - read here
Event Report - SAPtd Las Vegas 2015 - Analyics, HCP, and Fiori BUILD - read here
Event Report - Salesforce Dreamforce - Value for customers - but some concerns on direction - read here
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here). (The Day #1 Storify is here - the Analyst Day is here).
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.