Box CEO Aaron Levie on 5 big shifts in enterprise collaboration
- Summary:
- In London yesterday, Box CEO Aaron Levie outlines 5 big shifts in enterprise collaboration and Box's role as a best-of-breed cloud platform leveraging AI
A new generation of cloud-native vendors is shaking up the enterprise collaboration landscape, and we've already noted how 2017 is shaping up to be a critical year in the evolution of digitally connected teamwork. Yesterday, Box World Tour came to London, giving us a chance to catch up with Box CEO Aaron Levie's take on how the space is evolving. He didn't disappoint.
In a Q&A session with media he was frank about Box's positioning in the market, brutal on the outlook for traditional on-premise enterprise content management software, and enthusiastic about the emerging impact of AI and machine learning. Here are five key themes from his comments.
Box majors on content-centric collaboration
During the opening keynote session, Box had showcased partnerships with Google, IBM and Slack. Mindful of the jockeying for market leadership that's currently going on among collaboration vendors, I asked Levie how Box will guard against getting squeezed out of contention by rivals.
He sees Box carving a place for itself as the platform of choice for enterprises building content-centric applications, with Box providing the underlying storage, security, compliance and metadata services. Other vendors may be better placed to support other forms of collaboration, he explains:
A lot of this is going to be about mixing and matching different capabilities and different services, depending on the kind of application that's being built. The way that we see it is ... if you have a very content-heavy application, then Box makes sense to be the primary pillar that you're building on top of for that application.
But if you had, alternatively, a very communications-centric app, then it might be the case that Slack's APIs would be more of the center point, and then Box would be an API that you would plug into.
Customers are becoming adept at choosing the right platform to match their needs, he says, and most vendors today are ready to support environments where they can plug different services together as needed:
With very few exceptions, you're seeing most of the technology vendors take an approach towards openness and interoperability and the ability to have these pieces come together in a way that wasn't happening five or ten years ago ...
They recognize that there's a broader ecosystem that they need to be able to work with and interoperate with and we're excited about that trend. Because that foreshadows a lot of innovation that we're going to continue to see in the enterprise IT environment.
Best-of-breed is 'unstoppable'
The corollary of this new climate of interoperability is that the old approach of buying everything from a single vendor is now discredited, he asserts:
I think that most CIOs at this point have realized that the legacy way of just buying everything from one or two vendors actually is what caused us to see so little innovation in enterprise technology for so long. Basically it just created monopolies that then had no incentive to drive innovative products.
And so there's actually a recognition that we actually want market forces to play out in our IT stack. We don't want to be wholly focused on one or two platforms that we know are going to ultimately atrophy and not drive innovation. I think we're just at a point where it's now unstoppable as a trend.
Not all vendors have got the message, he believes, in part because they're still grappling with the move to the cloud:
I think there's a culture change that still has to happen in some of those traditional ERP types of product companies.
How do you move the cloud in general — that's taking massive amounts of energy and years to be able to go and do. But culturally, the openness and that ability to integrate with best-of-breed platforms is still early in a lot of those organizations.
On-premise is 'untenable'
Levie argues that enterprises have started to accept they can no longer keep up with the necessary pace of change if they try to do everything on their own on-premises infrastructure. He cites security and compliance as one of the factors driving this trend, while the other front is innovation:
The security model fundamentally in the cloud is going to exceed what you can do on-prem, and just the pace of innovation from Google and IBM and Amazon and Microsoft that you can take advantage of if your data's in the cloud is going to make it just literally technologically and competitively infeasible to do this in an on-prem environment ...
We're starting to see CISOs and even compliance officers that are recognizing that to get the modern compliance and security model, you're going to actually have to be in a cloud environment.
It's going to be very hard for enterprises to do international data residency if you're building out your own data centers in 30 or 50 different places around the world. It's just not possible, it's going to be untenable financially and technologically.
AI is the next frontier
Advances in artificial intelligence in particular — combined with the scale required to operate machine learning — are spearheading the innovation advantage of cloud platforms, Levie believes.
We're at a point where the base services that you're getting in the cloud — whether it's speech recognition, translation technology, image recognition technology, obviously these all happen to be more AI orientated — these are only going to be cloud services.
So you will be uncompetitive if you are still trying to maintain and manage an on-premises document management system in the future when you have all that innovation happening in the cloud. You need to be investing in platforms that can take advantage of that innovation and ride that tailwind.
Box is looking at two main applications of AI. The first is the use of AI services to analyze content and extract information, for example analyzing images to identify objects and recognize and classify text. The second is to surface relevant information that the user may not be aware of, for example from content being used elsewhere in the organization.
We can predict the kind of content that you want to be working on, based on the meeting that you're going into, based on the people that you normally work with.
That ability to not only find the data but the data actually comes to you in a more predictive way is a massive area.
Box as a system of record & engagement
One intriguing side-effect of being able to use AI to automatically find, identify and classify the information within content objects is that begins to add structure to forms of data that have traditionally been unstructured. Levie argues that this gives Box the potential to act as a hybrid system that combines features of traditional systems of record with more agile, people-centric systems of engagement. This in turn unlocks the agility that enterprises are looking for as they seek to move to a more agile, digitally enabled operating model, he believes.
Maybe I want to be able to pull up the marketing asset from five years ago, in my workflow of being able to collaborate with people. I don't want to be able to have to have two different systems that don't understand each other when I'm doing that.
So we think that there's going to be this fusing and conflating of the system of record and system of engagement for unstructured content, and that is I think a lot of what this digital operating model is about.
The digital operating model relies on the fact that you have to be more agile. Things are a little bit more chaotic. There's more unstructured collaboration.
The whole ERP system era is about structure, it's about waterfall systems, it's about linear business process. So your Oracle ERP system will never be able to adapt in a way to be able to help you with this completely different way of working. But we think that you probably have to use the two together in tandem, especially if you're a large business.
My take
As always, provocative food for thought from Aaron Levie.