Box takes a lesson from the enterprise world, launches reseller network

Credit: Robert Scoble via Flickr

Cloud collaboration company Box (formerly Box.net), which is now valued at more than $1 billion, is sure starting to act like a big company: It has created a partner reseller network to further extend its reach into enterprises.

The company announced the Box Partner Network with about a dozen third-party vendors who will resell Box cloud computing services. This adds to an advancement Box made in October last year around making it easier for vendors to integrate Box into their offerings.

New partners announced as part of the reseller program today include Autodesk, CollabNet, TIBCO, Tidemark and others.

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Box is more than just a file sharing and management tool like Dropbox and Egnyte, and this reseller network is beyond what those companies have, says Alan Lepofsky, a principal analyst at Constellation Research. But, he says, Box still has a long way to go compared to heavy-hitters of the enterprise collaboration market, where the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle have massive partner and reseller networks.

Lepofsky says using a third-party reseller can be helpful to customers because it can ease the onboarding process. Instead of working with a sales rep, sales engineer, and then implementer, a third-party can usually provide a single-point of contact for a sale with pre-packaged options for deploying the service as fast as possible.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.