August 2018 Summaries

Box.org is dedicated to empowering nonprofit organizations and promoting social good by providing resources and support to over 7,000 nonprofits globally. Focused on youth well-being, inclusion in tech, and humanitarian aid, Box.org offers access to Box's cloud content management software, volunteer programs, and coalition-building efforts through platforms like ImpactCloud.org and Pledge1Percent.org. Highlighted at BoxWorks 2018, International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Think of Us are key social impact partners leveraging Box's technology to assist displaced individuals and foster youth, respectively. The IRC benefits from Box's digitization tools, enhancing their service delivery and funding opportunities, while Think of Us utilizes Box for a "Digital Locker" to aid foster youth transitions. Box.org supports these initiatives through donations and matching funds, with a commitment to further philanthropic efforts via the Box.org Fund, which has contributed over $115,000 to various organizations. The fund is sustained by Box's financial contributions and a model that reinvests revenue from upgraded Box subscriptions by larger social impact organizations.

Enterprises face the challenge of operating in a complex global environment with diverse compliance, data protection, and security needs. IBM and Box have partnered for three years to offer solutions that enhance productivity, security, and collaboration by providing secure data storage, access, and analytics. Recently, they expanded their partnership to integrate IBM Watson's AI capabilities with Box Skills, creating custom skills that automate and streamline business processes, such as document analysis and data extraction. This collaboration allows clients like ATB Financial to improve efficiency by automating loan application processing. Additionally, IBM and Box are enhancing their cloud services, offering new storage solutions that leverage IBM Cloud's global reach to support client data storage needs, ensuring security and performance while maintaining local data control.

Box and Google Cloud have strengthened their partnership with the introduction of Box for G Suite, now available in public beta, which allows users to create and edit Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides directly within Box, facilitating secure and efficient collaboration. This integration addresses the challenges of content fragmentation and visibility faced by IT departments by centralizing content management and ensuring consistent security, compliance, and governance across all files. Users benefit from real-time collaboration and the ability to convert other file types into G Suite formats, while IT administrators can apply uniform security measures across the organization’s content. The initiative highlights the successful collaboration between Box and Google Cloud in advancing cloud-based work solutions, marked by other notable integrations such as the Box Bot for Hangouts Chat and the Box for Gmail Add-on.

At BoxWorks 2018, Box announced significant enhancements to their cloud content management platform, including updates to Box Skills and the introduction of new task and automation features designed to facilitate digital business transformation. The Box Skills Kit, set to be generally available in December 2018, enables developers to create custom AI integrations that enhance content in Box, supporting both pre-trained and custom-trained AI models from various providers such as IBM Watson Studio and Google Cloud AutoML. This toolkit simplifies AI service integration, allowing developers to extract and visualize insights from various content types directly within the Box user experience. Additionally, the updates to Box's task and automation capabilities provide users with tools to create simple triggers for recurring actions, streamline collaborative work, and maintain task tracking through an enhanced interface. These new features, including a no-code builder for automations, aim to improve agility and efficiency by allowing both internal and external collaborators to perform actions directly from the file preview, with the release of Box Tasks and Automations expected in early 2019.

Box has announced the finalists for its annual BoxBFD 2018 customer awards at BoxWorks, celebrating innovative customers who have excelled in utilizing Box's cloud platform to transform their organizations. The awards include "The Orchestration Award," which acknowledges companies like General Electric Company, IMURAYA K.K., and NASA for enhancing internal processes and collaboration tools; "The Creative Destruction Award," recognizing Geldservice Nederland B.V., Intuit Inc., and Raymond James for innovative business improvements; and "The Digital Transformation Award," honoring ATB Financial, the International Rescue Committee, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, and Warner Bros. Entertainment for adopting new technologies to transform their business models. Winners will be revealed during the Day 2 Crystal Ball Keynote at BoxWorks, where their achievements in leveraging Box's solutions will be celebrated.

BoxWorks is hosting a gathering for the higher education community, including CIOs, CISOs, IT practitioners, and students, to discuss cloud content management strategies and best practices, addressing the fragmentation of important content across various systems. The event will feature sessions on leveraging secure, compliant cloud content management solutions integrated with tools like Office 365 and G Suite, with a focus on creating modern digital campuses and developing next-generation research and education applications using the Box Platform. Presentations will cover perspectives from leading universities on navigating the complexities of deploying Box to large and diverse user bases, while lightning talks will showcase how institutions like Northwestern University and the University of Nebraska are using Box to streamline content management. Additionally, attendees will have the opportunity to engage in informal networking during a higher education happy hour, fostering further collaboration and knowledge exchange among participants.

Box and ServiceNow have announced a new integration aimed at enhancing enterprise business processes by allowing users to incorporate Box activity and content into ServiceNow workflows, a feature highly requested by large enterprise customers. This integration, available later this year, will facilitate content-driven workflows where Box actions such as file uploads and metadata additions can be seamlessly triggered within ServiceNow, thereby streamlining operations and reducing manual tasks. It will also provide IT departments with better control and visibility over content flow, ensuring that the most current file versions are accessible and managed with Box's security, governance, and compliance features. Both companies are committed to driving digital transformation across industries, and this collaboration is seen as a significant step in improving content management and collaboration for their mutual customers. The integration will be discussed further at BoxWorks 2018 by Box Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel and ServiceNow's Chief Product Officer CJ Desai.

Silicon Valley companies are trying to address diversity and inclusion issues, but efforts often remain isolated, raising questions about how to unite the tech community on this front. Box is committed to fostering an inclusive culture and is hosting its second Box Women's Network (BWN) Summit at BoxWorks 2018, which serves as a platform for women and men in tech to engage with female leaders and discuss societal issues affecting women. The summit anticipates over 600 attendees and features influential speakers like Patty McCord, Emily Chang, and Kimberly Bryant, who will lead discussions on the societal ecosystem impacting women's narratives. Events include fireside chats, mentoring sessions, and a CXO panel, offering opportunities for networking and professional growth.

Metrics data is crucial for observability at Box, where engineers depend on service metrics to assess performance and troubleshoot issues. The Observability Team provides instrumentation libraries that utilize Codahale Metrics, particularly focusing on histograms to measure value distributions like latencies. The existing ExponentiallyDecayingReservoir, which biases data towards recent entries, has limitations when reporting data every minute since it reflects a state from approximately five minutes prior. This issue is exacerbated when metrics stop receiving updates, potentially causing inaccurate alerts. Although solutions like the SlidingTimeWindowArrayReservoir offer improvements, they disrupt the established architecture of the metrics library. To resolve these issues, a custom ResetOnSnapshotReservoir was developed, which creates a new UniformReservoir every time a snapshot is reported, thereby ensuring data is relevant to the most recent 60-second interval. This new reservoir has been implemented as the default for all histograms and timers at Box and is available as an open-source resource.

Box has announced the appointment of Chris Baker as the new Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA, based in their recently opened European headquarters in London. Baker, who brings over 20 years of experience from high-profile companies like Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and SAP, previously led SAP Concur, where he was instrumental in significantly expanding operations and tripling revenues across multiple regions. His academic background includes a degree in Philosophy and Psychology and a Master's in Knowledge Based Systems, focusing on AI and Data Science. Beyond his professional achievements, Baker is actively involved in charity work as the Chair of the Board of Trustees for brainstrust, a UK charity supporting brain tumor sufferers, and enjoys outdoor activities like walking dogs and kayaking. This strategic hire comes amid Box's broader international expansion efforts, including new offices in Munich, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Tokyo.