The cloud storage wars continue with Box calling in the cavalry. The company has gathered up a gaggle of applications that users can access from mobile devices and use with Box’s flagship cloud storage service.
This Box OneCloud conglomeration is just the latest volley in an increasingly frenzied move by cloud storage vendors — startups and established players alike — to win business accounts that will hopefully pay for the service.
With Box OneCloud, a smartphone or iPad user can pull up QuickOffice to create or open a document, save it back to Box and share it with colleagues. A reviewer use Nuance Paperport to annotate it. And. when it’s ready, users can sign it with Adobe Echosign. All from their device of choice.
The goal is to re-create a desktop application suite for use first with iPhones and soon with Android devices, said Matthew Self, VP of platform engineering for San Francisco-based Box.
Box now claims 10 million users, up from the 8 million it had claimed as recently as last month. But the company does not break out how many of those users are paying customers. Box is free for the first 5GB of storage.
The battle among cloud storage vendors to become the “Dropbox of the Enterprise” continues at a frenzied pace with companies like Egnyte, Accellion, GroupLogic, SurDoc , Intralinks, YouSendIt (see disclosure) and others vying for the title. Dropbox is the prohibitive leader in consumer-oriented cloud storage with 50 million users claimed. Again, it’s unclear how many pay.
All of this maneuvering happens even as Google preps its long-rumored Google Drive storage offering and Microsoft pushes Skydrive and Windows Azure storage. This is going to be a long fight.
Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.
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