Box OneCloud provides a suite of about 30 free business applications that enable workers to access, edit, and share content from their iPhones or iPads.
Online storage and business application tools provider Box has opened
a new section of its cloud with new business applications that the
desktop-using public may not recognize, yet are popular among mobile
device users.
The 6-year-old Los Altos, Calif.-based company on March 28 launched
Box OneCloud, which moves to a new level the company's strategy to become a go-to provider of cloud services for enterprises.
Box
OneCloud provides a suite of about 30 free business applications that
enable workers to access, edit, and share content from their iPhones or
iPads. The plan is for Box OneCloud to be available for Android devices
by early May, Chris Yeh, vice president of platforms at Box, told
eWEEK.
The applications include QuickOffice, a full-featured Microsoft Office
spinoff for mobile devices; PDF Expert, which enables users to read and
annotate portable document files; PaperPort Notes, a new digital
note-taker; EasySign, an electronic document-signing tool; and Nozbe, a
project and time-management application.
You can view a
two-minute YouTube video here describing OneCloud.
"This is all about enterprise mobile at the core," Yeh said. "The number
of Box mobile customers grew by over 30X last year. Depending upon what
metrics you use, between 30 and 50 percent of Box's business now comes
from mobile. What's most interesting is the intersection of that with
business."
More Devices, More Fragmentation
What's happening is that as more and more people use different devices
for work, company data gets fragmented among various personal and
business applications and devices, Yeh said. Having a set of standard
applications permanently in the Box cloud helps keep the data on fewer
tracks and the number of variables down.
"When people use Box, they download documents, edit or manipulate them,
and try to load them back into Box, if possible. What we were seeing was
that things were fragmenting at the level of the individual device,"
Yeh said.
Box's "open-in" function allows users to open a documentsay a PDFin Adobe Reader, from Box's storage. When that happens, the file is
transferred over to the other app for the user to edit.
"The challenge for the enterprise is that, if you were using an iPad using
today's (Reader) app, that file would be gone," Yeh said. "That file
would be opened in a separate app, and you'd have no way to save it back
to the place where you opened it from, which was Box."
With the new application partners Box is incorporating in OneCloud, the
user now will be given the option to save it either in the document
application or back in Box's storage cloud.
There's no question that Android and iOS-powered mobile devices have
changed business computing.
A recent report by Forrester revealed that
about 33 percent of devices used by business professionals now are
non-Microsoft, and about 25 percent of those devices are mobile.
Forrester has predicted that the Windows device market share will fall
below 50 percent by 2016.
Box gives all those who
sign up in a personal account 5GB of online space free,
a standard inducement in this sector. Business users (three or more
users per account, free trials available) pay $15 per month for up to
500GB; enterprise users can get unlimited capacity, but they need to
talk to Box about pricing.
High-level Uptime Guarantee
The company also claims a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and offers Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, available redundant storage and
configurable permissions.
The Box OneCloud platform also will include a collection of developer
tools for building mobile application integrations with Box, Yeh said.
The new Box App to App Integration Framework reduces the amount of timefrom weeks to days, Yeh saidto develop apps with Box by
integrating directly to the file management capabilities of Box's mobile
platform. The new framework provides access to content stored in Box,
including offline access, Yeh said.
Chris Preimesberger is eWEEK Editor for Features and Analysis. Twitter: @editingwhiz
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
