NEWS
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Box Announces New Partner Network and Fund
Box announced today the Box Innovation Network (/bin), an alliance of platform partners including Appcelerator, Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Rackspace, SnapLogic and Twilio. In addition to the platform program, Box is investing up to $2 million in /bin developers.
According to Box’s press release:
A /bin member will build on the Box platform to deliver products that address the needs in enterprise software. A /bin partner will provide the members with the tools and services they will need to build robust applications using the Box APIs, but building on top of any of the partner platforms.
In other words, the partners of the network will provide developers with tools specifically geared for building on top of Box. This slide sums it up pretty well:
Box has been pushing its platform recently. Last summer the company launched its Mobile Dev Challenge contest, which I participated in as a judge. The winners were announced before the BoxWorks conference.
The $2 million fund for innovative enterprise apps built on Box takes this push to the next level, and ties in with all the vertical funds we’ve been seeing lately (such as Accel’s big data fund and Atlas Venture and Bocoup’s Game Lab). According to the announcement, the funding will be used for “equity investments, intellectual property acquisitions, and co-development of enterprise products,” which means Box plans to be very close to these investments and will consider acquisitions to be a part of the fund.
Box sees itself as competing primarily with Microsoft SharePoint. One of Microsoft’s enduring strengths is its developer ecosystem. So it’s probably best to see this as an aggressive move on Box’s part to build a large developer ecosystem around its own platform.
It’s also worth noting that Dropbox, which hasn’t necessarily been considered a competitor to Box, launched its business focused Dropbox for Teams service last month. Dropbox also has a developer API and has been very successful in getting mobile and collaborative applications to build integrations with its service.
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