As most traditional retailers and cloud service providers could  attest, once Amazon.com Inc. is in the picture, trying to compete on pricing becomes an excerise in futility. That’s why a week after Jeff Bezos’s low-margin juggernaut entered the enterprise file sync market, Box Inc., the leader in that space, has pulled the curtains back on a string of new value-added capabilities meant to take the fight up the stack to the realm of machine learning and data-driven policies.

The main highlight is Box Workflow, a repackaged version of the technology that the firm obtained as part of the acquisition of rival dLoop Inc. last November. The enhancement is aimed at making it easier for top customers such as General Electric Co. to manage their vast deployments. The suite employs machine learning algorithms to automatically group files based on type and topic as well as more granular properties such as legal status and change history. These are potentially important factors that can become cumbersome to track manually at large scale.

Even more difficult than monitoring an entire enterprise worth of documents is making sure that each item is where it needs to be at the time it needs to be there, a challenge Box Workflow attempts to elevate as well. The service makes it possible to create automated policies for handling specific actions ranging from relatively simple tasks such as alerting on document changes to routing invoices through every step of an organization’s particular financial renewal process.

To help customers take full advantage of Box Workflow, the company plans to expose the capabilities of the system, which is set to roll out in 2015, through its V2 interface. That kills two birds with one stone, making it easier for users to bake the new the functionality into existing processes that leverage the cloud locker while facilitating the creation of custom policies by the third parties. The latter aspect is especially important as the firm works to extend its platform with industry-specific features, a plan that hinges on the ecosystem.

Box Workflow was announced during the firm’s annual customer conference this week alongside several other major product updates, including a customized search function called Metadata Templates and  new capabilities for managing document retention schedules. The company also unveiled an updated version of its note-taking app that introduces annotation, version controls and checklists as well as the long-requested ability to create tables.

Last but not least, Box revealed a partnership with AT&T Corp. to provide organizations with the option of setting up dedicated links to its data center. That offers a faster and more secure alternative to going through a public network that addresses an important security requirement for the enterprise.

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