The box began its life. It was almost 20 years ago in a USC dorm when Aaron Levie conceived of an online file storage and sharing system. A few years later, Levie's original idea was becoming commoditized and he shifted gears toward enterprise content management in the cloud. It was a radical notion at the time in an industry dominated by homegrown giants like Microsoft, EMC, IBM and OpenText.
Traditional enterprise content management, whether on-premises or in the cloud, has involved storing, managing, protecting and governing unstructured content. This has always been more difficult to handle than data sorted into columns and sorted rows in a database.
Today, the industry is changing once again and Box is once again working to position itself at the forefront of that change. Levie has always had a knack for seeing where the puck is going, and his company is embracing the software shift toward artificial intelligence and workflow automation.
Last year, Crooze purchased box, a small company that specializes in workflow automation and metadata management with Box integrations, making it a logical acquisition target. Being able to manage metadata is critical to much of the automation in content management because it provides a way for software to identify and understand the type of content when no other structure is present. That can help move different types of content (whether documents, videos, images or audio) through automated workflows and reduce many monotonous tasks previously performed by boring and annoying humans.
But what Box is doing with Crooze and generative ai may be part of a broader shift in the content management industry, one that could be as important as the move from on-premises to the cloud that Box helped lead ago. 15 years.
Put content to work
Levie is really excited about the possibilities that Crooze technology can bring to the platform. “This is a very big business. The way to think about it is that, for the first time in Box, you will be able to create code-free applications that will allow you to render your content for any business process you want,” Levie told TechCrunch. In other words, Users can create custom applications that reflect business processes and make content much more useful.
Recognize that the folder structure can only go so far, especially when dealing with large amounts of unstructured content, such as contracts, for example. It gets unwieldy pretty quickly trying to find a contract, not to mention more detailed parts of the contract, when going through virtual folders.
“But with a no-code app development environment, you can create a real dashboard that shows all your contracts, all the data for those contracts, and helps you automate workflows around those contracts,” he said. That could involve editing, approvals, electronic signatures, etc.
Generative ai also plays a role here, allowing users to query the contents of folders to better understand them or locate specific pieces in a way that traditional enterprise search has not been able to do. Summarization capabilities give users the gist of a large cache of content without having to read every line. In terms of workflow, the coding capabilities of generative ai can help create custom workflows based on particular requirements automatically.
It appears Box is entering a new phase, says Jason Ader, an analyst at William Blair who watches Box. “Now I think we're seeing Box 3.0, where it's moving into this realm of ai and workflow and really going to the heart of a lot of those industry vertical workflows. These are tied to contracts and digital assets in obviously document-heavy types of industries where, frankly, ai has a huge role to play because it can automate a lot of that work,” Ader said.
In fact, the way customers view content is changing. They no longer just want to manage it, they want to put it to work in the same way that data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks have gone beyond pure data management to build applications on top of it. Simply having content in storage repositories is no longer enough, and ai is driving the automation of workflows and the production of actionable business productivity results.
“At the end of the day, companies want to leverage that content, not just store it, to drive automation and improve business outcomes,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis. “And therefore acquisitions like Crooze provide increasingly simple tools to develop those results. “Crooze is probably the most significant acquisition Box has made to date.”
Evolution of the content management industry
Box is not alone in this push, but as generative ai advances in the ability to generate content and query the content store, we are starting to see content management and knowledge management (enterprise memory) merging. What's more, the ability to generate code could allow companies to create custom workflows on the fly based on requirements and content types.
Cheryl McKinnon, a Forrester analyst who has been covering content management for two decades, says she sees the content management industry as a whole moving in the same direction as Box, and believes it's a natural progression. “I see this as just moving up the maturity curve, and this shift toward workflow and ai is absolutely where the market has been moving,” McKinnon said. “This is kind of a turning point where now it's not just about storing files and folders, but can we put those things to work? Can we think about content, not just from a storage point of view, but in the context of an entire business activity?
This is a big moment for the entire industry, says Pelz-Sharpe. “The ECM sector as a whole (which includes Box) now has the largest window of opportunity it has had in 20 years, opened to them by the interest and acceptance of organizations large and small in leveraging ai,” she said.
He thinks ECM companies in particular are well-positioned to take advantage of ai because they are already ensuring that unstructured data is accurate, relevant, secure and timely. That's an important piece that ai models need and that's often missing, he said. But the question is: Can Box and these other companies execute and take advantage of this moment?
“It is important to note that while this window of opportunity is real, there is no guarantee that ECM companies will take advantage of it,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “Companies like Salesforce, for example, are realizing the importance of managing unstructured data, as is Oracle (and other industry giants).”
“Where Box and its ilk currently have an advantage is that they have dedicated platforms to do this work and, just as importantly, a broad set of skills and experience to bring to the table.”
