200K businesses later, Box preps big backend updates

Box is now serving company #200,001.

The Los Altos, Calif.-based company, a cloud storage vendor for enterprises, today announced that 200,000 businesses are using Box. That’s 20,000 more than the 180,000 figure the company announced at its BoxWorks event in mid-Sept.

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Box also announced a “re-architected” sync client and admin console, as well as an internal consulting team and partnership with Capgemeni, the French consulting, outsourcing, and professional services corporation.

The new sync client, Box Sync 4.0, is 10 times faster than the previous sync client and reduces CPU usage by 25 percent, according to Box. The redesigned admin console, meanwhile, provides IT administrators more fine-grained tools to manage users and the content they share.

“It’s really about visibility at scale,” Whitney Bouck, general manager of enterprise for Box, told VentureBeat. “Giving admins easy access to search for users and content, or quickly add or revoke access and permissions to content, and to have a global view of where their content is going is incredibly important.”

Box Consulting, the company’s professional services team, is devoted to helping Box customers roll out their Box deployments. It’s essentially a formalization of a team that already existed at the company. Capgemeni will assist that organization with strategic planning, custom app integrations, and complex deployments.

“For example, if you have tens of thousands of employees getting Box accounts or you’re in a highly-regulated industry, you may want some expert help to design the perfect permissions model,” said Bouck.

Box’s primary competitor is Dropbox, which had a strong start in the consumer market and pivoted to focus on the enterprise. But Dropbox still has some challenges ahead of it — like shedding its consumer brand perception, as well as security and compliance issues — before it can dominate the more lucrative enterprise space. For now, at least, Box appears better positioned to capture major enterprise customers.

Box customers include enterprises like P&G, LinkedIn, and Panasonic. Box is also strong in the health vertical, snagging UnitedHealth Group and other health care customers thanks to its compliance with rules like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which describes best practices for storing, securing, and transferring health care data.

Dropbox and Box may be the biggest vendors focused exclusively on cloud storage, but they’re far from the only players in the market. Hightail, Egynte (whose new, $29.5 million funding round we covered earlier today), and others are all racing to capture the enterprise cloud storage market — and it’s still early days yet.

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