Box.Net Cloud Content Management

Box.Net is like Sharepoint but without servers, setup costs, manuals, downtime, firewall restrictions, migraines, permissions issues, three-year development cycles, hardware maintenance, storage limitations, backups, VPN, certification courses, browser incompatibility, setup time, hairloss, Microsoft...
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Box.Net Cloud Content Management Solution
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Box isn’t simply for the consumer market, it isn’t about storing and backing up files in the cloud, and it isn’t even just about sharing documents with your friends on the Web. Box.net is a complete enterprise-ready content management solution in the cloud available today for serious business use. The advantages of the cloud content management compared to the tradition ECM solutions are summarized in the following table:

Box.Net coined the term Cloud Content Management to denote the application of social computing and enterprise 2.0-inspired principles to content management. Box.Net provides easy-to-use and cost-effective cloud-based document management, storage, social networking, and collaboration solutions. With their enterprise security features, the breadth of supported mobile platforms, and broad integration (plugins) with a number of other web applications like Gmail, Salesforce, RSS feeds, Zoho etc, Box is challenging the dominance of Microsoft SharePoint/BPOS and Google and is a good alternative to consider. Box also offers support for all the mobile platforms including iPhone, Blackberry, Android and the iPad allowing users to truly access their content from anywhere and at anytime.

Box.Net Enterprise-grade security features
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Box has multiple layers of protection including application level, network level, and the facilities level. The available array of security features are designed to satisfy the most demanding enterprise security requirements including:

• Data Encryption on Transfer: Every file you upload to Box.net is immediately encrypted using SSL on transfer
• Data Encryption at Rest: Enterprise users can take advantage of their data being encrypted on servers using 256-bit AES SSL.
• Administrative Auditing: Administrators can monitor user and file activity and manage access permissions, groups and users.
• Sophisticated User Password Policy Enforcement: Manage complexity requirements, histories and forced resets.
• Role-Based Access Controls: Administrators can assign uploading, previewing, viewing and editing permissions.
• Ongoing monitoring and threat assessment.

Box.net functionality comparable to Sharepoint
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Box has a number of features that make it comparable to SharePoint, including:

• Share Folders to create online workspaces which are great for project collaboration. Workflow is enabled by assigning basic review and approval tasks to documents.
• View documents directly in your browser without leaving Box.
• Create wiki-style web documents for things like meeting minutes
• There's a real time activity feed to let you know what has been recently worked on, uploaded, commented, etc. This is functionality that SharePoint does not currently have.

There are Business and Enterprise Editions of Box that add even more functionality like full text search on documents, versioning and additional security including 256-bit SSL encryption and passwords on files and folders.

Rich integration with third party applications
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Box does provide the ability to integrate with third party applications such as Zoho, Gmail, Saleforce.com, LinkedIn and more. And it's extensible via its own set of APIs which includes one for mobile development. Some of the more important integrations that are available include:

• Google Gmail: Email links using Gmail or Google
• Google Analytics: View download stats on your shared files.
• DocuSign: Sign contacts electronically.
• FedEx: Print and ship documents to FedEx.
• Twitter: "Tweet" file links to followers.
• Salesforce.com: Access marketing collateral and other content easily from any page in Salesforce.
• Google Apps: Create Google Docs and Spreadsheets in Box, access Box files in Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Sites and more
• LinkedIn: Display a portfolio of work on your profile and collaborate with connections.

Box.net integrates with Gmail as well as with Google Apps. Users can work within their existing Gmail system and access all of their Box files from there.

Box.net versus Sharepoint TCO comparison
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In short, Box.net provides an enterprise customer with the most important features that one can get today from Microsoft on-premise SharePoint. Certainly SharePoint has a much richer and complex feature set and is well integrated with other Microsoft office functions such as calendar, email, contacts etc. But the question is whether you need all those features at the high cost you are paying for servers, up-front license fee, system administrator and IT staff. Consider that you may be paying as much $50,000 just for license fees and ongoing IT staff costs as well as maintenance costs

According to Microsoft itself, the baseline cost of a 75-user implementation over four years runs upward of $276,506, including $3,500 for software, and at least $77,000 for hardware and IT costs for MOSS 2007 administration. This cost according to the Think Strategies analysis of Sharepoint only covers basic MOSS 2007 implementation with no add-on components.

For organizations seeking to deploy DM and collaboration, this is only the beginning. Rather than an out-of-the-box solution or an on-demand service, MOSS 2007 is a framework application: a tool¬box of parts to be assembled by the customer. And its deployment requires almost as much thought as design¬ing, building, and maintaining a Web site from scratch. Not surprisingly, this complexity translates into a much longer time-to-value than companies expect, especially for busi¬ness process owners.

Clearly, with SharePoint, there is a considerable IT investment in servers, software licenses and implementation. In addition to the cost of servers and maintenance of those servers by an IT staff, Gartner warns that “Enterprises who do not hire or contract for experienced SharePoint talent will risk failure and disappointment” and recommends having an experienced architect or developer on the implementation team. Costs can balloon from the initial price of the servers and software licenses to also include developers, consultants and trainers all necessary to set up SharePoint correctly.

Box.net leverages cloud economics
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In contrast, Box.net does not require any software licenses or servers to set up and maintain because everything is managed centrally by Box.net. Once users are provisioned with accounts, they can easily begin using Box.net without any additional IT intervention. In contrast, SharePoint requires users to go to IT for even for the simple task of creating a folder to share a file with their team.

Box is so confident that there are so much better than SharePoint that they have thrown a gauntlet. So how does the challenge work? Enterprises will sign up for a free, 14-day trial of the Box.net Business Edition. If they're not happy after giving Box a spin, they'll get three months of SharePoint paid for.

Box.net doesn't just feel confident pitting its services against SharePoint. They're doing everything but literally shouting it from the rooftops, having bought a Bay Area billboard alongside Highway 101.

The Box.net business edition is priced at $15/month/user (15 Gb storage and 2 Gb file limit). The fact that you get a whole lot more in terms of project management, document management, and collaboration makes this a lot more attractive given that the prices are comparable with other cloud storage vendors. The 75-user implementation TCO for Box.Net business edition is $54,000 compared to $276,000 for Sharepoint, a dramatic cost savings not to mention ability to scale up and down quickly to changing business demands.

The savings multiply dramatically as you scale up your user footprint considering the $15/month/user Box.net price versus Sharepoint at approximately $75/month/user (at the low-end). Consider the following TCO comparison and a saving of $3.4 million for a 1000 user deployment. Additional consultant expertise, staff costs, and non-linear effects increase complexity and increase the costs for Share point even more. Note: The costs for Box.net Enterprise Edition are not provided on their website. Even if the Enterprise Edition is double the cost of the Business edition, we will still a see over 50% savings.

Last week (week of Oct 26th, 2010), Box.Net took a bold step towards disrupting the industry by offering what they call as Infinite Cloud

Their offering is so generous for the price point that you will never feel that you are running short of storage. They have changed their offerings as follows:

• Personal Plan: The free personal plan which offered 2 GB of storage has been bumped up to 5 GB.
• Business Plan: The business plan, mainly targeted at SMBs, which offered 15GB for each user now starts with 500 GB
• Enterprise Plan: The enterprise plan is supposedly unlimited. However, there is no pricing info about enterprise plan on their website and I guess they will price it differently for each enterprise based on factors like the number of users and few other factors.

All the new users will see these storage enhancements immediately and they will be rolling out these enhancements to existing users over the month of November.

Box.net customer base
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Box claims 60,000 customers ranging from individuals to small businesses to Fortune 1000 enterprises. The traffic to their site is impressive at about 1 Million visitors/month and gives some credibility to the size of their customer base.