Key Speaker: Mr. Steve Gilbert (Leader- IBM Cloud Content), Mr. Rich Howarth (VP- Strategy, IBM Analytics) & Mr. Rand Wanker (VP Product- Box)

This write-up will explore the important points learnt during the webinar conducted by IBM to explain the collaboration the company has agreed with Box, which is one of the top players in the Cloud storage space. The advantages both the companies will gain out of this arrangement have been discussed in detail.

Premise

IBM is one of the leading corporates globally which is in to content management and is now into mobile capabilities for social, cloud and security services. Box is one of the leading cloud content management platforms in the world. The companies will now be able to leverage each other’s capacities in order to deliver even better results.

Challenges Ahead

The companies on their own as well as their joint collaboration face several challenges over the next two quarters or more. There exist business and industry challenges as usual. The corporate strategy will now have to be curated in such a way that both IBM and Box are in a position to derive the best of results. The integration announcements across the supply chain will need to be framed in a careful manner so as not to disrupt existing business practices.

Changing Business Landscape

Work patterns are changing across businesses. Collaboration is now considered the new competitive advantage. Thus instead of creating unique products organizations are simply collaborating with one another to deliver best results possible for the final consumers. Employee working patterns have evolved beyond the traditional nine to five routine to a schedule where time and place have been eliminated as work parameters. One can simply work from home using one’s smartphone or tablet. Work processes have been democratized.

Digital marketing has revolutionized the way companies approach potential or existing customers. Now when businesses need to take major decisions, they are well supported business data backed sophistical business analytics. All this digitization however has created new security threats. With numerous financial transactions taking place on the virtual world, there are dangers of fraud and hackers tearing into organizational secrets. That is where collaboration between industry leaders in their own fields such as IBM and Box can do wonders for both.

Organizations are increasingly claiming that certain aspects of their business processes are getting outsourced to specialized third parties. For example, salesforce.com is apparently handling CRM, Workday doing HRIS for some and Net-suite managing ERP for others. However, few organizations have an integrated strategy for the overall online content. Rather that part is piecemeal. It is complicated for end users as well as difficult to maintain.

Strategic Partnership: IBM + Box

Following are some salient points highlighting the significance of the collaboration mentioned:

• Customers will now be served jointly by the two after a ten year agreement is inked.
• Co- development of cloud based digital solutions.
• As per business research conducted by Forrester, IBM stands top in ECM and Box stays number one in CCM Strategy:
• ECM- Enterprise Cloud Management
• CCM- Cloud Content Management
• IBM and Box together in turn serve leaders in other fields with their portfolio of offerings:
• IBM’s client list includes eighty percent of top thirty banks globally, a similar percentage of top twenty three insurance companies and twenty seven of the top global retailers, fifteen of top sixteen global telecom companies and a whopping fifty six of fifty eight government agencies.
• Box meanwhile has a customer base from seventy two countries and serves more than half the Fortune 500 listed companies.
• This will allow files and devices to sync seamlessly.
• Usual apps like Office 365, Slack, Netsuite and salesforce will be included on all devices to avoid duplication of effort.

Conclusion

As was the extremely successful experiment with Sally, a beauty products company, Box’s business innovations have generally worked out well. Box now being integrated to the giant that is IBM can only mean good news for the two organizations as well as the customer base. Greater emphasis and execution of data security is now expected. Work will now be integrated seamlessly with the Cloud allowing far greater data storage capacity.