Box, EMC Partner To Mobilize Documentum

LAS VEGAS — Box, formerly called Box.net, is moving up the partnership food chain.
On May 9, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based cloud storage and collaboration company announced at EMC World 2011 here a new agreement that gives its users access to EMC’s Documentum enterprise repository directly from the cloud.
Box, which focused on the consumer market during its first few years, is evolving steadily into the enterprise sector; this is another clear indicator.
For Documentum and its owner, EMC, this suddenly opens up a previously closed platform and gives it all the advantages of mobile-cloud access without having to do a lot of expensive new development. Box has already done that, and very well, indeed.
Box already has a popular application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices that connects it with a user’s PC or laptop, so companies using Documentum now can give users instant access to Documentum content wherever they are from all those mobile devices.
Box has previously enlisted well-known partners that include VMware, Samsung and NetSuite. The company that just a year ago had 65 employees and 2 million users now has 5 million customers- and that’s up 1 million from only four months ago-and its headcount has nearly doubled to 125.
It’s also storing upwards of 300 million pieces of content, superceding the number of volumes in the Library of Congress.
Box gives all those who sign up in a personal account a free 5GB of online space, 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.
The company also claims a 99.9 percent up-time guarantee and offers SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, available redundant storage and configurable permissions.
EMC acquired Documentum and its enterprise content management platform for $1.7 billion in December 2003.