Box.net has combined a simple idea – people want to share electronic files of all kinds on whatever devices they want to use – with the latest communications technology and a very clean, focused design to take the market by storm, says company General Manager Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck. It is well established in the SMB market, where it is seeing steady strong growth, but, she says it is the large enterprise market that is fueling “rocket ship growth,” she said in an interview with Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante and SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier on SiliconAngle.tv from EMCworld 2011. It has already “lightly penetrated” 73% of the Fortune 500, and the challenge of creating and executing a strategy to expand that penetration and reach the rest of the large enterprises out there is what attracted her from EMC.

And she is the right person for the job. She was GM at Documentum during its major growth period, moving to EMC when it bought Documentum. Before that she was at both Oracle and Sybase in the early 1990s, during their huge growth phases.

The secret to Box.net’s phenomenal growth, she says, is a happy coincidence of timing. First it has a simple but powerful idea. “Today people realize that it isn’t ‘information is power’,” she says. “rather it’s ‘collaboration is power’.”

Box.com is not the first organization to have this thought, but it is fortunate in that it came along at a time when the technology had arrived to allow it to create a simple, focused implementation of that idea. And now the market is dealing with the explosion of mostly consumer computing devices such as smartphones and tablets. “IT is anxious to say yes to users who want to bring their personal devices from home to use in the office, but at the same time it needs to maintain security, ownership, and the other things it is concerned about, over the documents and other files that are being shared,” she says. “We come in and give them a solution that meets all those needs. So our timing was impeccable in bringing that 2.0-level technology to a market that is desperately hungry for sharing in this way.”

Also, Box.net has what she calls “a natural virality.”

“Every time a new person gets a shared document through Box.com that person becomes de facto user,” she says. “Then she wants to share things with her friends. So it’s like that old ad, ‘and then he told two friends, and each of them told two friends’.”

Then it also is fortunate in its founders, including CEO Aaron Levie, who, she says, has an intuitive sense of the right decisions for the company. One of those is the “laser-tight focus” on the user experience and on providing the tools users really need while keeping the application light and easy to use, in contrast to the many “heavy” enterprise applications that are complicated with multiple features that 90% of users never need.

And now it is successfully linking to an increasing number of online services and enterprise and mobile apps. During the conference, it announced an agreement to provide access with documents in Documentum. It already has links to documents on many other platforms including Oracle and Microsoft in the enterprise, Skype and Google Docs in the cloud, and Docs-to-Go, the office application for multiple mobile devices including both the iPad and Android tablets.

And, she says, Box.net is an exciting company. It excites its customers with the value it can provide to companies as well as individuals, and internally it is an exciting company, full of high energy people with great ideas. “And we’re definitely hiring.”