Gartner names Box a Visionary in new Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms

On October 6, 2017, Gartner published its first-ever Magic Quadrant (MQ) report for Content Services Platforms (CSP). Previously defined as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), the Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant evaluated 19 different vendors on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Among those evaluated, Box was recognized as one of four vendors positioned in the Visionary quadrant.

This is exciting news, and comes on the heels of being named a Leader in Gartner's Content Collaboration Platforms (CCP) MQ earlier this year. Box was one of only two vendors that appeared in both the Content Services Platforms and Content Collaboration Platforms MQs (the other being our good friend Microsoft), and the only vendor with a single platform for content across all these use cases.

"Cloud, social collaboration, mobile and analytics technologies have transformed demands and expectations for content in digital business. The variety and volume of content continue to grow. So does its importance: increasingly, IT and business leaders use content to complement or even drive digital business processes."

"By 2020, 15% of enterprises will have dropped their traditional ECM provider in favor of a provider that offers consumer-like content services."

- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, October 2017

In its new MQ, we believe Gartner has expanded the scope of the Content Services Platforms market to marry front-office productivity work with back-office record-keeping and management of corporate content. The importance of these dynamics is reflected in Gartner's decision to restructure its ECM market coverage as content services, which can be aligned with platforms, applications and components. This shift in the content needs of the enterprise shows that our vision of Cloud Content Management is resonating.

In recent years, organizations that want to drive greater engagement with customers, employees, partners and suppliers have been turning away from traditional ECM approaches. These ECM systems took far too long to implement and were too costly to maintain. Extending collaboration outside the company's firewalls was difficult to achieve without IT's help and outdated user experiences led to poor adoption of the official ECM system. Meanwhile, stakes are getting higher in managing risk and compliance in a global market.

In the age of digital transformation, where markets are more competitive than ever and virtually every industry is being disrupted, innovative companies are turning to the cloud and looking for a better way to manage their corporate content. We believe today's CSPs must provide what the ECM systems lack:

• The ability to collaborate and extend process across the extended enterprise
• A fantastic user experience, mobile features and integration into a broad set of business applications
• Robust APIs and platform capabilities for building new content applications
• Security and compliance for every industry and geography

As a leader in Cloud Content Management, we know a thing or two about extended content processes that span organizational boundaries. Today, 76,000 customers and 65% of the Fortune 500 rely on Box for these capabilities and others, and we're thrilled to share a few customer wins for Cloud Content Management from earlier this year.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was tasked with modernizing its technology infrastructure and re-imagining how the FDA works with the life sciences industry. Their IT leadership chose Box to:

• Improve external collaboration with third party organizations, including external experts, and support audits, discoveries and reviews
• Digitize and automate processes, leveraging Box as a central content portal where staff can easily collaborate and share materials both internally and externally
• Reduce complexity of infrastructure by eliminating fragmented content and document management tools
• Provide the FDA with added cybersecurity control and administrative capabilities necessary to govern and protect sensitive information at scale

Metropolitan Police Service of London (the Met) uses 50,000 Box seats across the organization to:

• Manage content in the cloud as they drive toward Digital Policing for the Greater London area and its 8.6 million residents
• Provide a central, online location for CCTV footage, making it easier to search and share valuable evidence without traveling to local authorities or managing physical media such as DVDs or USBs

FICO, known for the FICO Score, works with the world’s top banks to help manage risk, battle fraud and comply with government regulations. They've used Box to:

• Connect their highly-distributed workforce across 25 offices in 6 continents and enable constant communication with external collaborators
• Retire their proprietary file system, which was labor-intensive to manage
• Give Sales and Marketing faster time-to-market cycles, boost work mobility, increase data security and reduce IT maintenance workloads

But this is just the beginning. At BoxWorks, our annual customer conference, we announced truly game-changing innovative content services for our customers to get a lot more value from their content in Box:

Box Skills: A framework for applying state-of-the-art machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing and sentiment analysis to content stored securely in Box. With Skills, you can gather context about any type of content that previously required an extensive number of human work hours. By providing intelligent metadata that can trigger workflows, establish retention policies and apply classification, Box Skills can help accelerate your business.

Box Graph: A machine learning-powered relationship model under the surface of your Box experience. Box Graph continuously learns from everything you do in Box, such as the shared links you generate, the colleagues and customers you collaborate with and the Box Notes you create to take meeting notes. It also learns from activity on other business applications integrated with Box, like a file shared on Slack or an updated Office document. We leverage this insight to power predictive, personalized and contextualized experiences across Box.

Box Relay: A new kind of workflow tool that allows anyone to easily create custom workflows to get work done faster. Leveraging IBM's machine learning expertise and our focus on simple and intuitive user experiences, Box Relay orchestrates the entire business process, start to finish — all within Box. Box Relay is slated for GA on November 13!

If you want to hear more about how companies are changing the way they work with Cloud Content Management, sign up for a BoxWorks Forum near you. And download your own copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant report here.

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[1] - Gartner, "Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms," K. Hobert October 2017