Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Box Brings the Cloud to EMC Documentum

By , co-founder and CEO

I’m incredibly excited to announce that Box has partnered with EMC Documentum, bringing Box’s powerful, cloud-enabled content collaboration and mobility benefits to one of the world’s largest enterprise content management platforms. Together, Box and EMC will accelerate cloud adoption within large enterprises globally.

It was only a month ago that Box introduced ECM Cloud Connect, a product designed to help businesses connect their on-premise content to the cloud. We then announced that we had brought on an Enterprise GM, Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, to help us work with and enable larger enterprises to realize this massive transition to the cloud with Box. Whitney joined us from EMC’s IIG Group and was an early employee of Documentum, so she has experienced first hand the evolution of Documentum and the broader content management industry over the past 15 years.

EMC’s Documentum is a leading player among the various systems of records for critical business information, and we want to provide the most seamless way users and IT managers can link our solutions together. Today, ECM Cloud Connect allows customers to move content automatically between the Documentum repositories and the Box cloud, and both Box and EMC have committed to jointly building even more powerful integrations later this year. Files, folders, and meta information will synchronize accordingly, meaning businesses will be left with fewer information silos and different copies of data strewn between their enterprise applications.

The changing Enterprise Content Management Industry

EMC’s selection of Box to empower mobile access and collaboration in the cloud highlights a fundamental shift going on in the industry. Over the past decade, much of the market has gravitated to SharePoint, leaving customers and partners’ fate at the whim of Microsoft’s timelines and strategy. This has provided customers with fewer choices in a time when market competition and options are more important than ever to the speed and agility of enterprises.

This partnership also highlights the evolving demands of organizations and their content strategy. Previously, the focus was on enabling users to pass information through a series of steps to orchestrate complex business processes. Most of the technologies we have in organizations today support this mindset; however, as business becomes more global, people become more mobile, and technologies become more social, our enterprise software needs to adapt to these changes. By working with EMC, we can enable all new experiences around the content that large organizations have already created and manage in their organizations. We can provide an unparalleled user experience, mobile access across devices, and the ability to collaborate with a distant partner as easily and securely as a neighboring colleague. More and more organizations are looking to move to the cloud, and together with EMC, we can make this transition a smooth one.