Box : OpenText & Documentum Acquisition - The Impact on ECM in Life Sciences

Earlier this month, hundreds of Life Sciences customers and thought leaders joined us in San Francisco for our annual user conference, BoxWorks 2016. Our investment in the Life Sciences industry started over 3 years ago and today, we are extremely proud to support digital transformation at over 650 Life Sciences organizations, including GlaxoSmithKline, Boston Scientific, Allergan and AstraZeneca to name just a few. At Boxworks, we announced several new initiatives that make Box an even more valuable solution for many of our large and regulated industries. These announcements included the all-new Box, a native workflow automation via a partnership with IBM called Box Relay and a new partnership with Google. The common theme tying all of these announcements together was Box's commitment to digital transformation for highly regulated industries, including our Life Sciences vertical.

Several Life Sciences customers use Box for: sales enablement and the distribution of approved promotional materials in the field, conducting investigator site feasibility surveys, and to provide controlled access to SOPs for manufacturing operators. However, the most interesting use cases will be powered by the Box Platform and are yet to come! We are making a deeper commitment to this industry and the Box Platform is a big part of it.

All this momentum, coincides with the news that came out right after Boxworks. Namely, the OpenText acquisition of Documentum. The sale itself was not a surprise, but the purchase by OpenText might be for some. This is a really big deal for the Life Sciences industry as many companies are invested in one, if not, both of these technologies. This recent acquisition has brought the ECM strategy to the forefront of the Life Sciences industry as customers will now have decide on what their next generation ECM architecture will look like. Likewise, leading life sciences vendors need to decide which content and collaboration platform to bet on for the future.

This is where Box comes in. We have been building a modern content platform that helps retire and replace legacy ECM solutions, storage infrastructure, and file sharing tools as companies move to the cloud and go digital. Box is committed to meeting the ECM needs of the Life Sciences industry by:

• Building out a Leading Life Sciences EcoSystem: Box is working with several renowned ISVs and SIs with domain expertise to build out a broad Life Sciences ecosystem to offer the capability to securely create, collaborate, manage and distribute both regulated and non-regulated content in Box. This ecosystem will leverage the Box Platform and give customers an opportunity to simplify their environment by creating a single repository for all corporate content.
• Offering Better Security, Privacy and Governance Capabilities than Traditional ECM Players: Box provides robust content security, privacy, retention management, legal holds and audit trails on a modern web-based, mobile architecture. All of this enables security and compliance for content even when it is shared externally or part of a new customer-facing digital experience that could be built by our customers or partners and powered by the Box Platform.
• Integrating Seamlessly with other Productivity Solutions: Box has invested heavily in our integrations with Office 365, Google Docs, Slack, and Salesforce.com to help customers change the way they work. The ability to seamlessly launch, create, store and manage content on industry standard productivity suites is sometimes difficult with legacy ECMs, especially if they don't have deep integrations and/or a mobile option. Now with Box Relay, users are able to automate internal and external workflows for processes that include review, approval and task management.
• Addressing Data Residency Requirements More Cost-Effectively than Traditional ECM: The global nature of the Life Sciences industry requires meeting stringent data residency requirements to operate in certain countries and regions. For the last couple years, Box Engineering has worked hard to create Box Zones which allows customers to meet data residency requirements around the world without having to configure and manage on premise software and physical storage. For now, we operate in Germany, Ireland, Japan, Singapore and the United States. We plan to add additional countries in the near future.

On top of this, we have some exciting announcements to make later this Fall as we continue to expand our Life Sciences footprint and invest in the ecosystem. Stay tuned!