Box’s Mark Wayland on the Importance of the Content Cloud

welcome to zcast everybody i'm zscaravello from zk research i'm your host and i'm here for another one of my thought leadership uh z cast in which i interview smart people from different companies and we talk about different trends in the industry today i am delighted to be joined by mark weyland uh chief revenue officer of box mark why don't you say hello and uh tell us a little bit about yourself in your box great thanks for having me honored to be on the uh z cast and uh so i'm mark whalen i'm chief revenue officer of box uh and in my role i'm responsible for sales channels solutions engineering a lot of the management of our customer relationships around the world and just hit my two year anniversary and uh great to be here today congratulations on two years and it seems like you get a big role there uh before we get into the q a though i do want to just give a quick shout out to g-week my uh who's my media partner this sea are done in conjunction with the ebt speaks program so thank you very much e-week now mark in recent months i've noticed box has been changing and positioning somewhere referring to itself as a content cloud can you explain what the box content cloud is yeah well it really is about the evolution of the company you know we're a 15 16 year old company uh went public about six years ago and it's really about the the evolution of the platform you know really starting from how can i store and collaborate on my content uh on the internet into really proliferation of sas applications over this last decade plus uh to this new world where governance security compliance are paramount and and all of this has been accelerated with this remote work trend and changing really the way that people work and so um we did some repositioning around what our platform really is around the content cloud and it's just a very simple message that says what it does and does what it says and and very specifically uh a central place to store and communicate and collaborate internally and externally a very different thing than for example a personal storage environment and and uh and then really trying to help the market understand everything that that would entail that it's more than just georgian collaboration it's it's really everything about the life cycle of content and one thing that we're finding and it doesn't matter if you're in life sciences or in media entertainment or some of the biggest consumer brands like our clients at nike at the end of the day content really is all of our businesses and um our knowledge workers you know sort of dip in and out of a number of different sas applications but when they're doing work they're very often doing work in content and we believe that box the box content cloud is the very best place to store communicate and collaborate internally and externally on that content and uh and it comes with you know when you put your content in there it comes with best in class security governance et cetera yeah well clearly working with content is really the you always think of it as the competitive differentiator for companies right their their ability to do that now i've been working with a box now a little while and to be honest when i first started working i was a little confused about your differences there's you mentioned personal storage i think if people that don't really know the space very well might might think you is you know lumping you in the bucket with the myriad of other cloud offerings and there's a number that are you know personal consumer there's some that focus on corporate um but how did how does what you do differ from the other business class cloud offering such as a a onedrive or google drive which you know in a lot of cases are free or low cost things like that but i i consider your best in class companies i'd like you your thought and how you differ from those yeah well um virtually every one of our customers either has g drive or onedrive because almost every enterprise around the world is using o365 or they're using google cloud and so uh i have a g drive account in fact i have multiple of them because i have personal accounts and i have my business account and you know those solutions are really good for personal storage uh they're not typically very good for collaborating around content and they're not typically very good for uh for sharing content externally and in fact many organizations turn off external sharing in those tools and so uh we basically are a great co-exist tool with all of those personal um storage solutions and and i think just to sort of to further answer the question we have to put in the context of the overall i.t landscape today i'm in my i think 15th year in sas and i recall uh you know in 2007 when i started at salesforce we are trying to get organizations to purchase their first sas application and if you look at the octa annual report our our friends at octa do this annual report called the business at work study which is amazing and today the average enterprise has 175 sas applications which is absolutely amazing so yeah now 175 isn't too many uh it's not 175 too many excuse me but it's probably a hundred too many and so uh cfos and cios and line of business you know knowledge workers are fatigued of all the sas apps and when you go into your octa login page or whatever your single sign-on page if you have to click through like five pages to get to the app that you need you probably have too many apps and so consolidation is ripe and one thing that uh one thing that all of these sas applications have in common is that they all spew out content in their exhaust but none of them are particularly good at managing content because that's not the core function of that application so we have pre-built integrations to over 1500 of these applications and instead of storing content 175 different times in all of these different applications you can store it in one place store it one time access it in all of those sas applications whether it's a workday or servicenow or a sales force or uh in in teams in onedrive in g drive because we have integrations to all these platforms you can store it once get the benefits of the content cloud for best in class security and governance rather than having islands of storage across that footprint 175 sas applications what ends up happening is knowledge workers get very frustrated because they can't find content and what they end up doing is getting in the time machine back to the 1990s and emailing content around like they always have and that's a terribly unproductive way of working and it should and it should concern cisos around the world because you lose chain of custody of the documents it can be forwarded on and uh and the like and so stored in the content cloud is really what we think that is the best thing to do pre-integrated to that whole um all those sas applications and with our recent launch of box sign that we just launched last week but you know back to my comment on consolidation organizations want to have fewer sas applications so we believe that a content cloud should include electronic signature because that's one very important step in the life cycle of many documents and so we now have it included uh for you know with uh with native um web signatures inside the box platform that's unlimited with no additional charge and so there's an opportunity for sas consolidation which we think is animal getting work done today means moving fast and keeping it simple and with everything that goes into reaching the finish line a signature should be the last thing that slows you down it's time for secure simple e-signatures built for the way you work introducing foxsign the first solution to offer unlimited e-signatures where your content lives with boxsign your teams gather secure and compliant signatures no paper required it's easy secure built into the box experience and it doesn't cost you a thing with integrations across popular apps like salesforce you get the freedom to work how you want whether you're closing deals onboarding new talent or forging a new partnership boxsign helps you get it done faster keep work simple and delight every user take charge of the contracts and content that power your business learn more at box.com sign yeah it's funny as you were describing the the process of emailing documents to each other and having version control problems i was myself feeling a lot of anxiety and pain i mean having to deal with that myself so it's uh it is a big problem now um it seems like though that box's goal of managing the entire content life cycle in one platform uh you know that's more than just storing the content right that requires a very wide range of product capabilities so you talked about docu or the document sending capabilities a little bit but how a box's products evolved uh to provide this this end-to-end offering yeah well we've been making tremendous investments in the platform over the last five plus years around workflow governance security um right when i started a couple of years ago we launched our enhanced security offering called shield which has been one of our most successful product launches in history you know prior to that we launched our governance product uh we launched a relay product called a workflow product called relay which has been really successful and then this year um the launch of box sign after an acquisition that we made earlier in the year and we spent the last six months porting that technology onto the platform so uh huge investments i think if just take signature for example the very important thing in in a signature workflow is not the signature itself it's everything that happens before the signature and everything that happens after and you know we would say that everything that happens afterwards after that document is signed in terms of where do you store it retention policies classification external sharing on the box content cloud that's best in class and everything that happens before the signature we've now built workflow into the content cloud so we can do a lot of those processes a lot of the authoring of documents may still happen in microsoft or in in other in other environments but because of our pre-built integrations those environments some of those workflows those documents can get authored and then they can run through workflow and through signature and then storage retention sharing etc in the content cloud you know you've got a pretty big customer base and is being the chief ribbon officer i'm sure you talk to customers a lot so in your conversations with the customer what are some of the biggest benefits they get you know as they make this transition to the content cloud away from the things they were doing before you know i i would say that customers come to box for a variety of reasons we're definitely seeing a lot of net new customers uh join our family purely for security reasons you know we've had a lot of customers that have had very concerning security breaches around malware and ransomware and infected documents uh and and they come just for that reason uh because you know with our shield offering we're actually scanning all the documents you have stored in the content cloud all the time and we're uncovering if there's malware ransomware in those documents and sending out alerts you know you sort of think of what we do in the content cloud from a security standpoint as the motion detectors in your home and you know security organizations are have spent a lot of time and money kind of locking down the doors and the windows with firewalls and perimeter security but the bad stuff can still get into your environment and we're going to catch it because we've got the motion detectors on your content so that's one of the sort of big pillars one of the big reasons why new customers come join us and then i would say the other one is really around this new world that we're in and changing the way people work and and that you know knowledge workers uh have too many applications that they're working in they have a hard time communicating and collaborating around content inside their enterprise and when having a single content cloud that single content layer across your organization integrated into your whole application footprint can be um implemented it really improves the way people work together and so whether you are sort of a microsoft shop or a google shop or a best of breed shop with you know slack and zoom uh we integrate elegantly in that kind of in in those different environments and i think that uh you know modern way of working is a big reason why customers join as well yeah i'm glad you brought up the changing nature of work because we are in this you know hybrid work model for the foreseeable future and i think the uh the old way of showing content doing the old s drive or p drive or whatever with the vpn link uh doesn't really work now the more distributed we become the harder the challenge of managing content and i know you guys have started using artificial intelligence as a way to actually make your system smarter correct yeah we have a lot of ai capabilities that are built in the platform around security and and metadata and a lot of other capabilities and and that's a big that's a big area of innovation for us and i think there's a lot more opportunity for us to advance the platform on that front um and i think that uh you know this idea of changing the way that we work is an important one because we're never going back to the way that we were before and you know we we're doing sort of some slow opens of our of our offices but you know for our company because uh we don't have any um client software on our computers when we were all sent home a year and a half ago it was no big deal because we already are sort of built for remote work but many of our customers sort of struggled on that front and if you look at for example what happened with zoom it's a fundamental change uh for organizations when they move to the zoom world because when you're in the office you know you generally weren't using zoom unless you were doing some office to office communication but when you go home it really fundamentally changes all the way that we all communicate and collaborate um but for box you know our customers when they are in the office they use box the same way now as they did before because it's it's cloud it's it's a content cloud so it's a content cloud when you're on premise in the offices it's a content cloud when you're at home it's a seamless way of working with content if you're you know on the road in a hotel at home in the office there's no change in terms of the way we've been doing this for years there's no change in terms of the way that people work the big change has been this real heavy adoption of the integrations that we have into all these other other platforms and more and more companies sort of uh adopting this idea of having a single content cloud rather than islands and islands and islands of content yeah i think the point you brought up too about your your customers not having to change the way they work is interesting because uh i've been talking a lot of business leaders about what the future work looks like and i said i have no idea you know the one thing i can tell you is that from a business leader perspective you better be prepared for an environment where everybody's in the office nobody's in the office and every possible combination in between right and you don't know when you're going to have to change strategies or when you have to bring everybody in or send them home but clearly that is a that can have a highly highly disruptive um uh impact on the work of the workforce so the fact that your customers don't have to i think there's a you know big feather in your cap um i think i think for us like this just take video for example when you're in a meeting as you know very well if you're in a meeting with 20 people and everyone's on video and they're all on their own machine video is a really wonderful solution but when we go back to this hybrid world if you have eight people in a conference room and two people on video it gets a little bit challenging because it because we're not all in this brady bunch sort of peer environment and um but but for box we don't really have that challenge you could have a hundred people that are all in their homes or you could have 50 people in an office and 50 people at home box works elegantly in all of those different scenarios and because we integrate into all of the sas apps that that organizations have it's just a very elegant solution that just happens to come with best in class security and governance yeah well that's great now you you alluded to some of the challenges companies have when they have information scratch scattered across multiple systems emailing back and forth but give our audience some sort of idea of the the pain you know what are some of those big problems they have and what are some of the ones they may not even know exists when they have information scattered all over the place well it's um there's a myriad of problems you've got a whole bunch of problems around security so chain of custody of documents uh you know a lot of these documents have incredibly sensitive information on there you know if you just think about um if you're if you are in media entertainment i mean you know virtually every movie that is coming out now was developed by people that work from home and and you know for many of our customers in that industry they're moving those files around as they're creating these multi you know these billion dollar franchise kind of movies they're moving them around in box uh from from um from developers uh home computers so uh that's a really big deal if those files aren't secure if they don't have chain of custody on those things those movies get leaked and and they lose the opportunity to have a big bang when they launch that content or if it's you know nike developing a new shoe in in consumer products or if it's a wealth management environment in financial services where you're where you're sharing highly sensitive documents like pay stubs and tax returns you do not want these documents being emailed around where someone can accidentally forward them from their phone while they're online at starbucks and you certainly don't want you know malware moving around your organization unfettered in email system so um there's a sort of security big bucket use cases i shared and then there's a lot about just securely communicating and collaborating around content and those are really big areas of opportunity for customers that about the content cloud yeah plus from a user standpoint i don't have to track 55 different places where i've stored my content anymore so my life becomes easier as well yeah and and we continue to make more improvements in the ui of box and just the two years that i've been here we've made dramatic improvements to the ui and huge improvements to our search capabilities we created a a new capability called collections where users can very easily kind of store data and and be able to capture data outside of the typical folder structure so you know you'd mention the s drive and c drive when i talked to the younger people on my teams that have only worked with a macintosh they don't even know what a u or an s or an f drive is because they've never been in that clunky world that we grew up in uh but those things are still out there there's still fire shares i talked to a financial services customer recently who um it's an investment bank and they have teams in london and san francisco and new york and when they're working on a big deal together they fight over which file server they're going to use because if they use the one in san francisco the team in london has to deal with latency issues and i'm just like are you kidding me are we really doing this in 2021 but it's really prevalent and and those are you know easy problems to solve with a platform like ours yeah i guess i just showed my age there by saying s5 so i'm with you yeah at least you understood the reference uh so being the the cro uh you know i know you're very involved in the company strategy and uh as a last question can you give us an idea of what's next for box well we've got some very exciting stuff that we'll be announcing at boxworks which is coming up here in the fall and i think what you will see from us is just continued innovation around really two themes one being changing the way people work and the other being around security and governance and making it the very most the most secure environment to store your uh most precious assets in an enterprise and so uh there'll be more enhancements on our integrations to other key platforms like the microsoft o365 stack as well as google uh salesforce workday servicenow all the top sas applications that organizations are using and then um more and more improvements on uh the ui and and the way in which people search and collaborate and communicate and work with content to make that experience for the end user just more and more rich as time goes on well mark uh you know thanks for your time but there's an expression in the itunes area that content is king but from an i-team perspective we really haven't treated it that way so you know uh thanks for the great work that box is doing and helping us at least move closer to that model where content indeed is secured and and protected and made accessible so anyways on behalf of mark whelan from box i'm zia caraval from ck research thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

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