Box looks to revamp business processes with Workflow; Office 365 tie-in going live
Summary: More than 240,000 businesses, 27 million users, and 99 percent of the Fortune 500 are now actively using the Box platform. — SAN FRANCISCO—After years of striving to revise how employees store …
Context & Ripple Effects
Workflow is the third act of a decade-long platform arc at Box: the company opened its storage to web apps with the OpenBox platform in 2007, extended that to mobile with OneCloud in 2012, and in July 2014 announced a deep Office 365 integration alongside removing storage caps for business customers. With today's launch, that integration goes live and Workflow layers process automation on top of the file store.
The move lands against Box's own scale numbers — 240,000 businesses, 27 million users, and 99 percent of the Fortune 500 on the platform — and drew same-day pickups from VentureBeat, Re/code, Gigaom, eWeek, GeekWire and others, an unusually wide syndication footprint that signals how closely the market is watching whether Box can convert storage share into process-layer relevance.
First-order effects
- Box's existing enterprise base gets workflow automation natively inside the platform they already use for storage, giving admins a reason to standardize business processes on Box rather than bolt on separate tools.
- Microsoft gains a live distribution channel: Office 365 content now sits inside Box-driven workflows, deepening Office 365's embedment in enterprises through a non-Microsoft front end.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in cloud content management face pressure to match workflow capabilities, because Box's removal of storage caps has already pushed competition away from capacity pricing toward what runs on top of the files.
- The Office 365 tie-in forces competitors aligned with other productivity suites to decide between building equivalent integrations or ceding the hybrid Microsoft-plus-cloud-storage segment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise content platforms consolidate around whoever owns the workflow rather than the repository — process automation becomes the lock-in layer once storage itself is free and interchangeable.
- Partnership structures like this one, where a storage vendor embeds a suite giant's apps, point toward enterprise software lines blurring between platform owner and process owner, with regulators and buyers eventually scrutinizing where that control sits.
The trend: Enterprise cloud storage is commoditizing into business-process platforms, with vendors racing to own the workflow layer now that capacity alone no longer differentiates.