File Sharing Vendor Thinks Outside the Box

Company:

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Box content sharing and file storage

Year Founded: 2005

Number of Channel Partners: 45 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Box.net combines aspects of content management and social networking technology to capture, centralize and share files.

The Lowdown: Big companies have used content management systems for years to wrangle huge volumes of structured content such as data files and, more recently, unstructured content such as documents. At the same time businesses are making increased use of collaboration and social networking tools for such tasks as coordinating team members working on a project.

Box.net offers an on-demand application that combines elements of content management and social software for capturing and centralizing the collective knowledge of workers throughout an organization and making it available to anyone who needs it.

Originally Box.net targeted its service toward consumers. But today it's going after business customers, pitching its Software-as-a-Service applications to small and midsize businesses and workgroups inside large companies. The company already has some 50,000 customers.

"It gives you the ability to have a file system with full collaboration capabilities without the [on-premise] file server," said Bob Stevens, CTO at Blended Systems, an Atlanta-based solution provider that resells the Box.net service.

Businesses that use Box.net's service can set up collaboration accounts that allow users to share files from any location without having to deal with VPN and file transfer protocol (FTP) technology, said Rich Forsen, president of Network Depot, a network service provider in Reston, Va., that's reselling the Box.net service. Forsen said a major demand driver for the service is that it can handle big files that choke other file-sharing networks.

Last month Box.net added search capabilities to its service, allowing users to conduct full text searches across all their stored content, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, PDFs, TXT and CSV files.

Stevens at Blended Systems sees Box.net as an alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software, which he said can be more expensive and, as an on-premise application, requires "a gaggle of programmers to maintain," he said. "For the smaller organization that needs to share documents, [Box.net] is ideal."

While most of Box.net's sales today are direct, the company is scaling up its channel partner program and now has some 45 resellers globally. "We have our sights set on a variety of resellers," said Karen Appleton, Box.net's business development vice president, citing MSPs, network service providers and technical VARs as examples.

One innovative incentive Box.net offers channel partners: When a solution provider's subscriber shares content with someone else and that second party also becomes a subscriber, either through another reseller or directly with Box.net, the original solution provider receives some credit for the sale.