By Guido Haarmans Vice President, NetSuite Developer Programs & Business Development

Box, one of the most successful cloud start-ups around, partners with NetSuite on file collaboration. I sat down with Box co-founder and CFO Dylan Smith to talk about Box, the partnership, and how Box uses NetSuite.

Box as NetSuite Customer
Q: How has NetSuite helped you manage Box’s phenomenal growth?

A: NetSuite has been a great partner for Box for quite a while. We’re kindred spirits of sorts, and because we’ve built our entire IT infrastructure in the cloud, NetSuite was always a natural choice for Box. What’s great about NetSuite is that it has helped us manage our accounts payable in a really efficient manner. We have an AP department of one person. It’s not exactly an army of folks, but being lean is a core value of Box. That’s where NetSuite came in. They dramatically increased our productivity. Because it’s simple to use and set up, we allow employees to create their own POs, streamlining the process further and helping us move fast and GSD (get stuff done), which is critical to us as a fast growing start-up. And our relationship with NetSuite goes beyond accounts payable and across our whole operation. Our management systems are only becoming more important as we grow and mature. NetSuite has listened to us throughout our entire growth process.

Q: Prior to NetSuite, how did you GSD?

A: Before NetSuite, we had very few purchasing processes in place, not to mention no real way to define and make new processes scalable and accessible to employees. This was a huge issue, because you can only grow as fast as your infrastructure can scale to support your activity. NetSuite really cracked the bottleneck for us and helped us supercharge our ability to operate at a time when we needed the headroom to keep expanding fast.

Q: Now that you’ve integrated Box with NetSuite, what features do you love with the integrated products?

A: The ability to review and see documents related to an order or account in context is great. Especially when you’re processing a lot of orders or payments, it’s really helpful to be able to see the full picture around a transaction. Just pulling up a quick PDF of the invoice that resides in Box is helpful when you’re researching and approving payments makes things easier and more efficient.

Cloud-General
Q: As you’ve grown, how has the conversation changed with your customers?

A: Box pivoted to focus on the business market and the enterprise in 2007 and 2008. Up until that time, we were split between business users and consumers. After we made that call, we had to pour our energy into developing a deep understanding of business use cases and how IT leaders measure, select, and deploy technology. In that sense, it’s been a five- or six-year journey where our conversations have become much more focused on business needs: security, scalability, uptime, business continuity planning, and all of the big metrics that a customer needs to understand before making a huge investment in your company as a long-term partner.

Q: Like NetSuite, you have had significant success helping larger companies be more productive and efficient. How have you made this move up-market?

A: We have customers that are individuals, small teams, and small businesses (with as few as 5 or 10 seats), but more and more we’re working with large corporations on department and company-wide deployments in the tens of thousands of seats globally. Just in the past year, we’ve seen our average deal size more than double.

It’s really our customers that have helped us understand the features they need to deploy Box at that kind of scale. We focus on enabling collaboration around content. The more we talked with customers, the more clear it became that content— everything from purchase orders and invoices to sales collateral—is at the center of almost every business process. In other words, they helped us understand that content is a core asset for them, and that to deploy Box at scale they needed us to give them real control and visibility into how their content is being created, managed, and shared. And as we invested in our administration console and capabilities, security, and the Box platform, they’ve responded by growing their relationships with Box.

Q: You recently launched Box Embed. Talk about the power of integrating multiple cloud applications.

A: Box Embed is a technology that makes it incredibly easy for any software provider to integrate the entire Box experience into their own web-based application. Practically, this means if you’re a Box user, you can access and manage the content you’ve stored in Box while you’re working in any other cloud app that you use to get things done.

This is really powerful. Content—business documents like invoices, proposals, presentations, and so on—is a core part of how business gets done. So being able to access all of those documents in other core business applications really drives productivity.

NetSuite is just one great example. One typical use case is that you can be in NetSuite processing an invoice, and within the same browser have access to the original scope of work for that order, or any other piece of content relevant to that account. You’ve got the key information you need to move transactions along and make good decisions.