Cloud management service Box has opened up to third-party developers in full, unsealing access to instances of the platform and a new credentialing model fit for enterprise usage.
The company announced Box Developer Edition during its Box Dev conference, where Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO, detailed the developments to a crowd of over 1,500 developers. With the keys to the castle now in hand, developers can unlock the full power of Box and use it to transform the way people work, he stated.
"The opportunity to build transformative enterprise applications is greater than ever, because today's digital enterprises are using technology as a competitive advantage to create more productive workforces and more powerful customer experiences," said Levie.
Third-party software engineers can now create apps or modify existing software to leverage independent, developer-controlled instances of Box. The new user and authentication system enables developers to set up rules for users, and Box completes the package with all of the enterprise class functionality that the company has already been offering to Fortune 500 companies.
"We've spent ten years building the robust technologies needed to meet the requirements of enterprise customers, going light years beyond commodity cloud storage offerings," stated Box. "We know first hand that without these capabilities in place, it's very difficult to sell to the enterprise."
Along with the Box Developer Edition, the company also launched a new family of software development kits (SDK) for mobile devices. The SDKs include the tools needed to build apps with Box's Content, Preview, Browse and Share components.
As if the unsealing of Box wasn't quite enough to spur developers to create new software for the cloud platform, the company also announced that two of Silicon Valley's top venture firms plans to back startups that build software based on Box. Bessemer Venture Partners and Emergence Capital both plan to invest $20 million in companies developing software with Box.
The new application programming interface and other Box development tools will help change how a new generation of developers help shape the world's enterprises, proclaimed Chris Yeh, Box's senior vice president of Product and Platform. And that $40 million in venture capital has the potential to fertilize a host of new Box apps.
"We've gone way beyond commodity cloud storage by constantly investing in new technology to support our more than 45,000 customers globally, and making those innovations available to developers," said Yeh.
