January 2018 Summaries

Life sciences organizations, including pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies, face challenges in managing regulated and unregulated content due to stringent regulatory requirements and the complexities of innovation and collaboration. Box addresses these challenges with Box GxP Validation, a cloud-based platform designed to manage both types of content securely and compliantly. This platform includes a Validation Accelerator Pack (VAP) and daily automated testing to ensure continuous compliance, enabling companies to efficiently handle clinical development and manufacturing processes. Box partners with USDM to provide Cloud Assurance, helping organizations maintain compliance as they adapt to changes. The platform supports various use cases, such as secure content exchange during clinical trials and M&A activities, compliance with 21 CFR Part 11, and integration with life sciences ISV and SI partners. Over 800 life sciences companies, including major industry players, are already leveraging Box to streamline operations and enhance collaboration, with the new GxP Validation offering promising transformative improvements in content management and compliance capabilities.

Box has opened its new European headquarters in London’s Tech City, occupying the top two floors of the newly constructed White Collar Factory on Old Street. The move reflects the company's rapid growth and strategic emphasis on maintaining proximity to its UK and European clientele, after outgrowing its previous office in Mayfair. Britain's Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Matt Hancock, attended the official opening ceremony, highlighting the UK’s favorable environment for digital businesses. Since entering the European market in 2012, Box has expanded its presence with offices in major cities including London, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Munich, and currently employs nearly 200 staff across Europe. The new headquarters will accommodate the company's UK employees, offering expansive views of the city, and underscores London's role as a vital hub for Box's continued growth and success in the region.

Box has significantly improved the build performance of its web application, which supports 25 locales, by optimizing the webpack build process. The initiative involved experimenting with various configurations and tools, such as enabling caching on the babel-loader and utilizing the new uglifyjs-webpack-plugin v1, which improved performance by 26% and 45%, respectively. Additionally, the company avoided exporting an array of configurations, which, in conjunction with leveraging node.js Child Process API on a 10-CPU machine, enhanced performance by 28% and 67%, respectively. These optimizations collectively reduced the build time from over three hours to nine minutes, resulting in a 95% performance improvement. The improvements also highlighted the importance of managing memory usage and taking advantage of multi-core build machines to support the growing number of locales efficiently, while ensuring reliability in the asset-building process.

Box has introduced the "Innovator of the Month" award to recognize IT professionals who effectively leverage Box technologies to transform their organizations and share their experiences with the broader IT community. This monthly award, starting in February, highlights individuals who demonstrate deep knowledge of the Box platform, have driven organizational transformation through technology, and actively enable peer success by sharing insights and learnings. Honorees will have their stories featured on the Box Blog and social media, acknowledging their leadership and contributions. Each recipient will also receive an exclusive gift package to share with their team, celebrating the innovative ways customers use Box to achieve significant business outcomes.

The text explores the challenges and opportunities in sourcing diverse technical talent, emphasizing the importance of looking beyond traditional recruiting methods to include local and underrepresented communities. It shares the personal journey of an IT Director at Box who, despite coming from a disadvantaged background, leveraged non-traditional educational pathways to build a successful career in tech. The narrative highlights Box's commitment to diversity and inclusion by partnering with organizations like Year Up and revising job descriptions to focus on essential skills rather than formal degrees. This approach has facilitated the inclusion of talented individuals like Rolando Argueta, who, despite lacking a conventional academic background, has excelled due to his competence and positive attitude. The text concludes with a reflection on the benefits of diverse teams in fostering better work environments and the author's optimism about the future of inclusive hiring practices in the tech industry.