New from Box: industry

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Box is launching a suite of services and apps tailored specifically for different industries as well as a new workflow management tool, Box CEO Aaron Levie announced Wednesday during BoxWorks 2014. The new product lines, dubbed Box for Industries and Box Workflow, highlight the shift the Los Altos-based company is attempting to make to distinguish itself from the file-sync-and-share space and target the content management and workspace-collaboration market.

With Box for Industries, the company will support the retail, healthcare and media and entertainment industries and eventually hopes to target every major industry, said Levie during the keynote session. The service is essentially a customized version of the core Box platform that is tailored to meet the needs of a particular industry. For example, Box for Industries for the healthcare industry comes with the ability of users to access content on their mobile devices that adheres to HIPAA standards and will allow doctors to collaborate with one another on research.

Box consultants as well as the company's partners in each industry - like Stanford Health Care for the health care industry- will help its clients craft a custom Box platform that meets their needs.

The Box Workflow tool, slated to hit the market in 2015, is a workflow management tool that will supposedly streamline work collaboration when it comes to notifications and document access. As an example of how Box Workflow operates, Box senior product manager Annie Pearl explained that a company can set up time-based notifications on time-sensitive documents, like a contract, so that users will be pinged by Box through their mobile devices or email, and not be caught off guard when that document expires.

Box isn't alone in trying to gain a foot into the enterprise collaboration market-a crowded space in which Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all recently made clear they are investing in as well. And it's not just the big guys who are making moves in enterprise collaboration; a host of startups - like Slack and HipChat - have emerged that are each touting their own take on workplace collaboration.

Box still has that long-awaited IPO looming in the background, and it remains to be seen how Wall Street takes to Box's new announcements. In late August Box brought on former Salesforce.com and Lifelock executive Villi Illtchev as SVP. As part of his role, Illtchev will help direct the company's acquisitions strategy.

Be sure to listen to Levie's conversation with Gigaom on a recent episode of The Structure Show, in which he discusses Box's IPO plans, how its trying to distinguish itself and why he thinks Silicon Valley is experiencing a revolution.

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