HITS

Box Sign launched in late July and Box is seeing strong initial interest in its new e-signature capability that is being natively embedded in the Box platform, according to Aaron Levie, the company’s CEO.

“I have not been in a CIO conversation really actually in the past couple of months where Sign wasn’t a major pillar of the conversation,” he said Sept. 10 during the Deutsche Bank 2021 Technology Conference.

“We’re going to be rolling out the product throughout the fall to all of our customers,” he said, noting that it’s being included in business and enterprise Box platform subscriptions with “varying degrees of advanced functionality.”

The company will have additional ways to monetize Box Sign usage with application programming interfaces and more advanced functionality, he pointed out.

And the firm is going to use Box Sign to “go wider and deeper” with customers, he said, explaining the go-to-market strategy is to drive the widest penetration of Box with three goals: drive seat growth, drive higher pricing per seat and improve net retention.

Echoing a comment Levie made in June during an investor webcast hosted by William Blair & Co, he said: “We think we’re still in the very, very early innings of the e-signature market.” In June, he also said Box was looking to play a “disruptive” role in the still-nascent electronic signature market.

“We will continue to, of course, partner with any e-sign provider that our customer wants to use,” he said Sept. 10, noting Box currently partners with companies including Adobe and DocuSign. But now the company also has a native solution for those who want a “seamless Box solution,” he said.

“We’re going after a $55 billion-plus market and e-signature… is certainly going to be bringing even more dollars into the platform,” he predicted.

The market is “growing at a fairly healthy rate and becoming only more important as time goes on, when you think about remote work, digital transformation and data security,” he added.

“Megatrends” Driving the Future of Work

“Three megatrends are driving the future of work,” according to Levie.

They are: the ability to work anywhere at any time on any device; being digital-first because every customer, partner and employee interaction is now digital; and security because the “very severe” ransomware and cybersecurity threats “we’re seeing are only becoming more rampant,” while compliance challenges are increasing also, he said.

As we move from paper and analog systems to the cloud, “we need to digitize every single business process,” he said.

“We’re actually in the very early innings of a broader transformation of how work is getting done and how content is at the center of that workflow,” he went on to say.

The Evolution of Content in the Cloud

“We need a new approach to content in the cloud,” according to Levie, who noted that the on-prem file server was the dominant content storage technology in the 1990s, enterprise content management was the dominant one in the 2000s, and enterprise file sync and share in the 2010s.

Each technology was “appropriate” for its time but “they don’t really solve the main issue today, which is work from anywhere, digitize your processes, connect to all of your applications – all with a single platform,” he said.

Cloud content management, including one secure platform for the entire content journey, is what Box sees as the technology needed now, he said.

He explained: “What we’re trying to do is build the content cloud that will power the entire life cycle of content, from the moment that you ingest it from any system to when you protect it and classify it with something like Box Shield, which is our advanced security suite, to when you collaborate inside and outside of your enterprise, to being able to drive workflow automation with Box Relay, to getting e-signature signed on a document with Box Sign to being able to publish content internally and externally to different departments and teams, analyzing the strength of that content and how useful it is [for] your customers and your partners and what content are people most looking at.”

Also factored in is the “ability to then retain and govern and protect content over the long run – that’s our governance module, Box Governance – and then the ability to take every one of these capabilities and extend them via our APIs into any other application,” he added.

The Overall Strategy

The Box platform, meanwhile, is now used by  67% of Fortune 500 companies and there are more than 100,000 customers who are “leveraging our platform,” Levie also said. Those customers include companies of all sizes across multiple sectors, including “digital disruptors” and some of the largest tech companies, he noted.

Box is out for its platform to be the “most extensive cloud in the market,” he said, adding: “Across the entire enterprise, content is at the heart of business and businesses run on content, and that is why we built the content cloud and why we sit at the center of such important work that our customers are doing.”

The company’s shift to multi-product solution selling is paying off also, he said. In the past quarter, 73% of its deals above $100,000 were Box Suites multi-product bundles, he noted.

“We’re doubling down on those bundles by introducing an Enterprise Plus plan that makes [it] even easier for customers to get our multi-product advantages,” he pointed out.

In Q2, Box had a 106% net retention rate, which was up significantly from a year earlier and he predicted it will grow even higher over time, he pointed out.

The company’s focus is to “turbo-charge” the growth it’s been seeing in recent months, he said.

As for the future, “what you’re going to see going forward is we’re just going to keep doubling down on this strategy,” he said.

What’s Coming Soon

“We have massive advancements that we’re going to be making” at the annual BoxWorks conference, Oct. 6, “around Box Security functionality, advanced security capabilities and data governance features,” Levie said.

“We have new innovation around workflow automation and collaboration” also and then “we’re going to be advancing our platform and our integrations with every major vendor that our customers are working with,” he explained.

Also, “we’re going to be expanding into additional categories where we think they are adjacent to the content workflow – but we want them to be native on the Box platform and delivered very seamlessly to customers – and that’s where Box Sign comes in,” he added.