Box and Salesforce have expanded their long-standing partnership in a deal that underscores how product integration can be different, and better for customers, in the cloud era. Here are the key details from a blog post by Box CEO Aaron Levie:
Starting with a pilot today, we'll let customers seamlessly take any of the content they have stored in Box and access it throughout multiple Salesforce experiences, including mobile apps, customer records, Chatter feeds, and more. Sharing proposals with customers, collaborating on contracts and ensuring sales reps have the most up-to-date marketing information has never been easier.
We're also introducing our first Box SDK for Salesforce, which allows customers and developers to embed Box’s world-class collaboration and content management capabilities into Salesforce-built applications. Across retail, life sciences, financial services, and many other industries, enterprises can now leverage Salesforce and Box's platforms together to seamlessly design modern digital applications that transform key enterprise workflows.
Unlike in the client/server world where enterprises ended up with sprawled data across file servers, content management systems, FTP sites, and collaboration tools, this doesn't have to be the case in the cloud era. Enterprises should have a singular way to manage and control their content, no matter what application or location they're accessing that data from.
To deliver on this vision, we need a broad ecosystem of leading applications that work together to drive interoperability across the cloud, reducing the need to duplicate data and information between systems. And, with this new level of openness, customers can begin to choose the platforms that work best for their business, instead of being forced to buy all of their apps from a single vendor.
The Bottom Line
The pilot of Salesforce Files Connect for Box will begin in February with a general-availability launch mid-year, according to a statement. Pricing won't be disclosed until that time. The SDK is now available on Github.
“Box and Salesforce have worked closely together in developing this integration," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "The new offering is much more robust than just surfacing files stored in Box inside Salesforce records. The pointers to these files are actually Salesforce objects, meaning they can be shared in Chatter posts, followed for update notifications, processed in Wave analytics, be triggers in workflows and more."
In contrast, the existing integration between Box and Salesforce is based largely on folder and permission management, along with the Box Embed framework that a number of other vendors also support.
Levie makes a valid point: The cloud should mean customers should have their choice of vendors. On paper, Files Connect for Box should indeed provide a more productive experience and reflects the type of integration cloud vendors owe to their joint customers, where two different applications can completely intermingle.
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