Box releases Box Embed, enabling enterprise applications to unify content under one platform

Box has once again found a way to use the “cloud” to make things easier for the enterprise. At this year’s Boxworks conference in San Francisco, Box co-founder Aaron Levie will introduce Box Embed, a service that integrates with enterprise applications in an attempt to unify all content shared between different systems.

Starting today, ten major enterprise applications have partnered with Box as part of this release. These applications include Concur, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Eloqua, FuzeBox, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM, and ZenDesk. Each of them have entered into a symbiotic relationship of sorts and are all connected through Box Embed.

With 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies using Box and over 14 million users around the world, Box realized that sharing content easily is critical to every business out there. Through the use of Box Embed, companies will be able to have a central repository of information where they can find all their content across any of their enterprise solutions. Levie believes:

By extending Box’s enterprise content and collaboration across today’s leading business applications, Box is transforming the way people and organizations access, share and manage their business information in the cloud. We’re making it incredibly simple for our partners and developers to leverage the power of Box from within their services, and to provide a central content layer for enterprise productivity.

Box Embed is an HTML5-based framework that integrates with the enterprise to deliver Box’s distinct suite of collaboration and management tools. IT departments can take Box Embed and easily integrate it into any Web-based application without worrying about security issues — all the company’s business content is centrally managed and secured in Box.

A problem companies may have when dealing with multiple enterprise applications is the unnecessary duplication of content across all platforms. How can I unify all the various silos of content I have and consolidate them into one place? A customer support ticket filed in ZenDesk may also be needed in Salesforce and also in Eloqua. But when you upload one file into each of these systems, how do you know which one is the latest version? What happens when one document has been updated but not the others? Versioning, security, and efficiency seemingly are at risk when it comes to file management at this scale. Box Embed aims to solve this.

Businesses need a solution that will help their employees to become more efficient without having to worry about content “turf wars” amongst its enterprise applications. If a platform can’t integrate properly with another, Box Embed seems to be creating that “standard” as a means to make work more productive and be that middleman.

In support of the direction of what Box is doing, it has received considerable funding from firms like Salesforce, Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Atlantic, U.S. Venture Partners, New Enterprises Associates, and most recently Intel Capital.

All Box customers can get Box Embed at no charge starting this week, with NetSuite and SugarCRM being the first two applications to support it. The other eight applications will begin supporting it starting next quarter.

Image credit: Box