The winning combination of technologies

The winning combination of technologies
Box and Microsoft are bringing together the best of two organisations’ respective cloud offerings 

Caspar Herzberg |


This article first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of The Record.

At the BoxWorks 2017 event in San Francisco, US, in October 2017, Box and Microsoft teamed up to announce that a new release, bringing together the two organisations’ full cloud capabilities, was on its way.

Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, joined Box’s CEO Aaron Levie at the event to reveal that Box using Microsoft Azure will be generally available from November 2017.

The release is the first product milestone in the expanded partnership between Box and Microsoft, and will allow customers to benefit from the combination of Box’s cloud content management platform with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Box using Microsoft Azure will help simplify collaborative processes between employees and external stakeholders. Users can securely manage content for the enterprise, and carry out integrations with over 1,000 best-of-breed software-as-a-solution apps, including Office apps.

Users can work in their familiar productivity and line-of-business tools, while capitalising on Box’s cloud content management capabilities to enhance their own custom applications and deliver new digital content experiences. They can also streamline business processes for their employees, customers and partners.

Engineering teams at Box and Microsoft are currently working to introduce more capabilities to Box using Microsoft Azure over the coming months. For example, Box content will be powered with intelligent capabilities from Microsoft Cognitive Services. This will enable customers to automatically identify and categorise content, trigger workflows and tasks and make content more discoverable.

The two companies will also leverage Microsoft Azure’s broad global footprint to meet data sovereignty requirements and ensure compliance with industry regulations or corporate policies.

One company looking to harness the power of Box using Microsoft Azure is Flex – a San Francisco-based provider of design, engineering, manufacturing, and real-time supply chain insight and logistics services.

“Flex has successfully been using Box as our primary platform for digital content sharing, storage and collaboration globally,” said Gus Shahin, chief information officer of Flex. “We also use Microsoft Azure as one of our cloud computing services for our global IT infrastructure. We look forward to seeing how Box and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services work together to deploy next generation artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.”

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