Aaron Levie's struggling storage solution company, Box, is partnering up with IBM and Amazon to offer something its competitors don't — geographically boxed zones of cloud storage.
Box Zones are primarily targeted towards non-US businesses where barriers block Box's services from working effectively due to government regulations limiting where national corporations can store their files.
"For instance, hospitals in France or financial services firms in Germany face strict regulations around where their files are stored, leaving them with a limited set of options, and keeping many of these enterprises stuck on legacy infrastructure," Box explains in a blog post.
With Box Zones, customers will be able to choose a storage component from another vendor inside their own country with Box's software layered over it. The new product will continue as a beta in May. For now, Box Zones will work with Amazon's Web Services in Ireland, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.
Box Zones' ultimate expansion will eventually include a partnership with IBM where more zones will be added to the product using IBM's data centers around the world. That means Box can snatch up even more customers in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe since they'll be able to store their content inside their country by using third-party storage providers from businesses based in-country as well.
Box Zones joins Box's other offerings such as Box KeySafe and Box Governance. Altogether, overseas companies can use domestic storage solutions while still making use of Box's content and management services as if they were using their data in Box's datacenters based in the U.S.
For Aaron Levie, Box Zones continue his thrust into making his company more than just a storage solution company.
"Storage is just a piece of the content management puzzle, not the business model," Levie shared in a past interview.
As Box Zones continues to cast its services around the world, Aaron Levie may just be able to prove that the market is indeed more than just about storage, and that Box is the platform to make something of it.
