Box Inc. is building out its content cloud with the addition of an important new capability.

The company said today it’s rolling out Box Sign, a native e-signature capability within Box that will give users the ability to electronically sign contracts and request signatures from others.

Box said Box Sign enables unlimited signatures and comes with a robust set of application programming interfaces that will enable businesses to modernize and manage their agreements entirely in the cloud.

The Box Sign capability was made possible through the company’s $55 million acquisition of Dutch startup SignRequest BV earlier this year.

Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie told SiliconANGLE in an interview that e-signatures were the most-demanded feature from its customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. With most enterprises forced to do business online, people couldn’t meet face-to-face anymore to sign contracts and deals.

“So many more transactions are moving from paper-based processes to the cloud,” Levie said. “But there are problems with existing solutions. They cost too much, they’re fragmented and there are security problems.”

Box Sign is aimed at doing away with all three problems. It’s natively integrated with Box, meaning no more fragmentation and customers don’t have to pay extra to use it. The capabilities are even made available through the Box for Salesforce integration, so it’s possible to generate and create non-disclosure agreements, contracts and the like from within Salesforce. As for security, Box Sign inherits Box’s rock-solid security and compliance profile, the company said.

“This is the most significant new product we’ve done in a number of years,” Levie said.

Box Sign features include the ability to send and request signatures from anyone, regardless of if they use Box or not, templates for common repeatable processes such as NDAs, plus tracking tools and email reminders and notifications.

Box said Box Sign is available to a subset of its customers starting today, and the rest of its users will see it in the coming months.

“Box’s approach is different as it thinks about the lifecycle of the e-signature which includes the actual signature but also the upstream and downstream processes,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst with ZK Research. “As businesses adopt e-signatures, it’s important to think of it as part of the overall document management process versus something done in isolation.”

The Box Sign capability helps Box to build out what it likes to call its “Content Cloud,” which can be thought of as an infrastructure for managing all of a businesses’ documentation and paper work. With Box Content Cloud, the company is aiming to displace fragmented legacy systems such as network storage and document and file management tools with an all-in-one service that adds in key automation and security capabilities.

“We’re building out a content cloud that helps customers manage the entire lifecycle of content in a single architecture,” Levie said. “So you’ll see us invest in all these pillars.”

In line with that, Box has announced a new subscription plan called Enterprise Plus that’s available starting today. It’s highest tier yet that includes all of its major add-ons, Levie said. It bundles Box’s basic capabilities with Box Shield, Box Governance, Box Relay, Box Platform and the new Box Sign. In addition to that, Enterprise Plus customers will be able to send an unlimited number of documents for signature directly from within Salesforce.

Levie said he believes Box Enterprise is likely to see some solid traction, noting that the company recently saw a “reacceleration of growth” from the fourth quarter of last year, with deals above $100,000 growing significantly. He also pointed to the trend of hybrid work, in which people will continue to spend many hours working remotely with only limited time spent in offices.

“New virus variants and inadequate vaccination means hybrid work will continue for quite some time,” Levie said. “We think content plays such an important role in hybrid work, and it will be a major fixture of what hybrid work looks like in the future.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Images: Box