Box + Okta: Connect and Secure Business Content with Your Users, Partners, and Customers

Speaker 1:  I'd like to welcome Rand Wacker, the VP and Head of Marketing at Box. Welcome, Rand.

Rand Wacker:  Thank you.

Speaker 1:  It's all you.

Rand Wacker:  I wanted to say thank you all for being here. This is actually not my first Oktane. I've spent a lot of time with Okta over the years as we've partners at Box and Okta for almost since the beginning of both companies because clearly when you're trying to access, and content ensure, and collaborate in the Cloud, you need to have tight integration with your authentication. The reason that I'm here today with a very long titled session is because we actually wanted to talk very much from the customer context like yours about people who are using Box with Okta, not just for internal collaboration and helping their users be more productive, but also how within their broader partner landscape.

Are they using Box and Okta? They connect between different partner organizations, and even more importantly how are building applications to connect with their clients and their customers. Half way through I'll be joined by Murali here from Perkin's and Will's. They have built some really cool applications using both Box and Okta in order to interact with their clients in their business of designing and building some of the most interesting structures out there. 

Just to get started, I wanted to get a sense for the room and understand all of your roles. I'm going to ask for a show of hands of whose in corp. IT, whose in security, or who might application development arms. Show of hands for folks who are in corp. IT. Okay, big, big part of the room. Folks from security? Another big part of the room. What about application development and creating new applications? Everyone in the front row. I love it. Perfect. Then also I'm assuming that most everyone here are Okta customers to some degree. How many folks here are familiar of Box, either at work or personal? Great. Thank you very much for working with both our companies and hopefully we can give you all some new information today.

My name's Rand Wacker. I've been with Box for about four years before running product marketing, I actually ran the enterprise product management team. Have a long history in enterprise IT and we've led many of the developments that Box has done with regards to security and infrastructure and particularly some of the more advanced content management features that I'll tell you a little bit about in which were key to what working at Will's was using overall.

Just to set the landscape a little bit, the challenge that we see and I think this ties very much into what we're going to talk about with Murali is that every company is facing a set of pressures due to numerous forces coming through the industry, and roughly people call this digital transformation, but it's a combination of pressures from users, pressures from IT in the way that we're running our infrastructure and then also pressures on the business overall and how businesses need to evolve and how they're interacting with their clients.

To start from the users' side, I think this is going to be obvious to everyone in the room in that we are all being pressured to provide a service to our users and a level of experience, which is very similar to they might have at home. If you think about it as consumerization of IT or the ability for people to bring their own devices and for your users to choose their experience and to have a highly productive experience no matter where they are or where they're working is really key, but has been a big shift for IT because now, we have to figure out how do we support a whole bunch of different devices. How do we manage users who may not even be on company manage systems and how do we bring all these different applications together in many ways.

One of the other challenges has been for IT organizations that are under constant pressure to reduce cost or to streamline operations and at the same time figure out how do you shift from an on-prem model very often more into a Cloud. Luckily, with this crowd, I'm sure that many of you are already well down that journey of going into the Cloud and using Okta as one of the primary tools there, but it then changes some of the shift of security and how are we actually looking at identifying what risks are coming our way and what do those look like now in a world where we don't necessarily control all the infrastructure, but we have to partner with our providers very much.

Then the last one for businesses is actually the primary conversation for today because what we really want to look at is what's happening with companies as their trying to change the way they interact their clients, and I'll just give you an example and it's pretty common if you think of some of the transformations to digital businesses to think about a company like Netflix and how Blockbuster had to change, or how Uber and Lift are disrupting the taxi companies and effectively, what you have is a set of businesses that are being changed by software and particularly the user experience they're driving with their customers.

In many ways many of these revolutionary organizations did this not by just taking an application, writing an application on top of their existing business model, but they had to rethink that business model from the ground up. The way that for example Uber and Lift are creating their basically supply of drivers is a very different model from a taxi business and how they were operating in their previous model of capital intensity and a lot of fixed employees. I think that Perkin and Will's, we'll hear a little bit about it has been ahead of that transformation as well, and they've seen the way they want to interact with their clients through every step of the design and build process is really, really important because clients and customers aren't just judging their user experience against maybe our competitors.

They're not looking at your app versus maybe your nearest neighbors' app, but they're looking at your app versus their experience of Amazon or their experience with Netflix or all these different ones. Many of the business leaders and the teams that are building the ways to interact with clients are rethinking from the ground up. What that interaction looks like and what's the right technology to power them.

From a content management perspective, before we get into the identity and authentication piece, some of the biggest challenges we face is that there are solutions for content and collaboration and the actual management of critical systems has really been fragmented over time. We started a long time ago with net apps and filers and just large team drives, which were essentially unorganized and ungoverned piles of information and piles of data in your data center. People would use email for sending files back and forth and even then even put sensitive, critical files on the CD-ROM for long term storage and things like that.

Back in the '90s we had a fairly crummy way of managing important data and it all became basically a big waste bin. That gave rise to the enterprise content management market where companies needed to have more structure around highly critical business documents, whether it was financial information or employee records, or any type of client interaction. If they had a policy where they had to either retain for a certain amount of time or it needed to have some metadata and other information on it to describe what the document was about, or if it needed to go through some sort of approval or workflow process. 

This gave rise to the likes of Documentum, and OpenText, and IBM FileNet where you could create much more structured content repositories, but they had a very poor user experience and they are very difficult to adapt. From there, we, Box really pioneered what's known as the enterprise files sync and share space. Although, Gartner just renamed the space to content collaboration platforms, and we're still the leader in the space by all measures and customers still think of Box primarily in this area, but what we're trying to solve is much broader.

What we're trying to solve is a content layer across all of your applications and all of your users so that you can be connected much better internally as well as externally with your partners and clients because what's happening now and to meet that business challenge that we're just talking about a second ago, is that now you're trying to build new applications for interacting with people outside your company and you're very often choosing platforms like Amazon or Azure, and there's a need for using that type of dynamic infrastructure out in the Cloud, but then you need additional services on top of it if it's Twilio for communication or Stripe for payments or Box for content. 

In many ways, the content strategy in most organizations has become very siloed and most companies I'm sure all of you have many of these in each of these different silos and they don't talk to each other, and you're really getting a really high cost for not a ton of value if you think about what you could do if you had all of these connected together. What we really focus on at Box is figuring out how to have one platform to connect all of your content. Very similar to the way that Okta would think about the world, is what's one platform to connect really all of your applications and all of your users.

How do we build something for example that lets you collaborate across boundaries. It's not just internally with your internal employees, but it's also with your partners and anyone outside your organization. How do we create a platform, which is secure and compliant enough to use pretty much for any file, any type of information regardless of what industry or geography you're in. You no longer have to think about, "Well this is customer data and it needs to go into this specialized system." "This is my marketing material, so it's going somewhere else.", and sometimes I don't know where to go because I have files in way too many different places. 

Integration is really critical to us. We are allowing people to integrate now over 2,000 out of the Box applications that plug into Box for managing the content underneath. As well as numerous people building new custom applications on top of Box, and we'll talk a lot more about that. Then one of the most important things to us overall is how do we design a system that works not just for ITs' needs, but also creates a fantastic user experience, and that the security teams are very happy with and that developers can create new applications on top of.

At the end of the day, these are the core tenants of what we believe is critical when it comes to a content strategy for organizations, and we've really taken on the term Cloud content management, which is to describe how do you think about all those different silos and bring them together in a way such that it's very, very easy for your users, your applications, and your most important information to all work together.

Box has a number of customers in both the large enterprise space as well as over 70,000 small and medium customers. Really focused across all verticals. One thing that's really important is that we are a very horizontal application and very similar to email, people will use Box for really almost every job function within a company and that's one of the reasons that the Okta partnership is so key because we do touch very often every single user in an organization, and you want to keep that authentication very, very seamless. 

Let's talk about the way that Perkin and Will's is using Box, but to think about it very simply, you could think of Box as a platform where your content, your metadata, all the collaboration that you're trying to work with your teams on is stored internally. Then we have a number of security capabilities from our encryption key management to our data residency solutions, compliance, data protection policies, all the information governance systems that we use, and then we expose all that through an API. For example, I was talking to a customer earlier today, they were looking at moving a huge number of on-prem files into the Cloud, and they were debating all these different systems. 

Some, which could be basically on-prem software stack that would stand up in AWS and then use that for a system. That's very difficult to manage. Some could be building an application themselves on top of Amazon S3, but then you have to add these layers of metadata and retention policies and all these things. Box is a Cloud service from the ground up that provides all of these in one package and takes a lot of the management and complexity out of what you need to do.

Then it connects very deeply into all the applications you use every day. We use Okta for the authentication layer obviously, but then also all those other Cloud applications that Okta's plugging into also store content in Box. We are deeply integrated in the Microsoft Office and across the mobile web and desktop versions. We are first class citizen where you can keep files in Box and then co-edit them in real time in office as an example. Salesforce is one of our most popular applications where every contract or customer file that you need to have. Retention policies and e-signature capabilities on and everything. They'll drop that into Salesforce and then that will automatically go into Box, and you get a much better experience without having to pay Saleforce's exorbitant storage costs and everything.

All of these applications come together so that people can really work in the application that makes the most sense to them because just like with Okta, you want to make a very easy for people to use what they're most application is every day. That's what we really is critical for the Box experience and all these integrations. Just to explain a tiny bit more about what we're doing and I'll build this out a little bit. We're really helping people solve three major buckets of use cases. What's the core productivity and collaboration needs of a company? How do I share files not just internally, but also externally? How do I get mobile access to all of my files? How do I replace those network file shares, but still have basically a mounted drive that might be bactched by storage on the Cloud? 

These are some of the core productivity and collaboration use cases that we see as critical to working between teams both inside an organization and outside, but then we also have customers that are starting to build more intelligent business processes on top of Box and this is very interesting because if you think about business process, it used to be very internal and manual to an organization where you might have an HR onboarding, and someone might, for example, need to manually enter in details from a employee's driver's license or their social security card, and that might need to go through a bunch of manual steps, and someone's got a checklist of everything.

How can we automate that? How can we make that faster? We can automatically extract the text from the driver's license for example. We can put it into a workflow that the team can easily build and manage that lets them speed up those processes. We can make this mobile so that not everyone has to be chained to a desks and move these things through, and we can extend it to partners and customers outside your organization. It's not just people inside your organization, but if you need to get background check information, for example, it's very easy to do that by passing that information out to someone outside and not necessarily having to be tied into your own data center.

Then when we talk about digital experiences, we talk about platforms for building new applications where you might be creating brand new types of systems that create either an app or a web portal or even an internally phasing system for better interaction with your clients, your partners, or your employees. The APIs that we exposed and the STKs and all of the reference applications we build let people build things like secured document portals so that they can easily pull up financial information or build field worker enablement tools where someone out in the real world can know where to go next and can be able to access all the most important information on what they're working on.

These digital experiences and being able to do this across the spectrum so you don't have a silo of my productivity information and my team collaboration is in Sharepoint, but my individual files are in one drive, but I need to build a different application for my customers and that's in Azure. We bring all these things together and then we bolster it with a foundation of trust and security capabilities. One of the key pillars, which is Okta and identity and then make sure that we can give the governance and compliance across all of that. 

Box and Okta is really bringing together the security and the productivity needs of the users and giving a really great experience as you cross between all these applications and all of these company boundaries. We help people collaborate internally and externally. We're helping improve these fragments and processes so that you're not having to manually provision people in one system and then move them over here, and how do you lock them out if they've left the company. Then we keep the security of your content, very easy to maintain while making sure that it's very easy to define who should have to what, to monitor that, and to block it if necessary.

Okta is a really key partner for us when it comes to our trust ecosystem. They're one of our leading integrations where almost of our customers who are doing single sign on or using Okta across their both internal and external authentication. We do a million things internally for the security of your content including a lot our compliance regulations at the bottom, and this is one of those ways in which we are helping to externalize a lot of the complexity and cost that you have in managing your own IT systems and security programs. 

A number of joint customers between Okta and Box, many people that are using us both for the core collaboration, but now also for the new Okta platform offerings and the Box platform offerings, and that's what we wanted to talk about here today. If you might give a hand to Murali from Perkin and Will's. We're going to talk about all of the new applications that they're building for interacting with their clients.

Murali:  Thank you.

Rand Wacker:  Yes. Hi. How are you doing?

Murali:  Good. You?

Rand Wacker:  Good. Good. I think you might start by telling us a little bit about Perkin's and Will, and what you guys do.

Okay. My name is Murali Selvaraj. I'm the Chief Information Officer at Perkin's and Will. We are 2,400 person architecture and design firm. We have a family of the industry AEC, which is Architecture, Engineering, and Construction. We represent the A of the AEC business. We are about 2,400 people spread out around 30 offices in North America and around the globe. We are generally known to work on very complex building types from large scale medical districts to hospitals to airports to high rise buildings. We don't do the small buildings. We do very large complex buildings generally.

The firm is grounded in some core values around sustainability, social purpose, well-being. We are a firm that generally thinks big about how buildings and design can impact society.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. I think you and I met almost two years ago at your beautiful headquarters out in Chicago. It's always amazing to see what an architectural firm will do for their own headquarters to showcase it all.

Murali:  It's one of the most complex and strangest projects that he can ever do.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah, exactly. You've been using Box and Okta for some time and today you're here to tell us about the custom application that you're building on the platforms, but maybe you might share a little bit about your journey to this point and how you've gone through that previous journey you were talking about.

Murali:  Sure. I think we all start on this idea. I'm an architect by training, so I understand the business side of the equation. I'm an architect by education, I moved to the IT side a few years ago. You clearly understand the pinpoints in how we deliver services to our clients. After all, we have a large design firm. We have 2,000 architects and designers and they experience you. I've worked with architects and designers even for your basement or your house building.

The experience of going through the journey or an architectural design process is pretty complex for an end user basically. Multiply that from residential to hospital systems, it is very more complicated. Building types are generally complex. Projects get very complex in nature. There's a large ecosystem of players that architects being at the center of the ecosystem and the clients being at the center of the other side of the ecosystem. There's a large ecosystem of players that are in wall between contractors, subcontractors, creates people. The clients, and the client's brokers, and the client's agents, and the owners and all that. 

Given that, we saw that, "Oh my god. How do we bring in digital transformation in this space?" because the industry's very analog and traditional in nature because after all what we end up is designing buildings that actually get built. By definition, it's an analog space, but how do you embrace the idea of digital analog, not digital in pre-placement dialog, but one dialog, which is like built environment is done right, which we are really good at doing. How do you bring in the digital layer that makes clients happy and engaged. 

This morning, Todd talked about three constructs, which I thought resonated and probably will apply to our use case is around engage, I think he said like, "Engage, delight, and secure." Our pinpoints and our use case was built around this idea of how do you engage our client, we don't call the customers, we call them clients. As if you're building a large medical center, how do you make sure that the dean of the medical center knows exactly where you are in the project process. During the time the project is built, how do you delight them, and still how do you do it in a very secure way?

Our pinpoints and use cases were fundamentally based on, I'm just copying from Todd this morning, delight, engage, and secure, and we are trying to look for platforms that can do that because we are a design firm. After all we are a design firm, we are on technology firm like most of you are and we don't want to pretend ourselves to be a technology consulting firm. We are a design firm rooted in design. The idea of going out and finding platforms that can help us do this really fast, rather than waiting 10 years, can build this really fast is where we started.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. I had imagined even though the dean of that hospital is going to be the one that's the most central client to you, when actually executing the project, you must be dealing with hundreds of subcontractors and sub subcontractors and everything, right?

Murali:  Yeah. Back in the day, I think you're absolutely right, I think you brought up this point earlier in this conversation. Back in the day, if you're representing enterprise IT, you know that there used to be an internal component, which was safe on-pre, secure, and you are pretty sure that everything is safe and secure. That's internal component. Then there's an external component, which is the stuff that faces the client and the ecosystems, if you may, and there was a clear separation or a siamese wall between the internal and external.

We don't see that anymore in our industry. Back in the day, we used to have on-prem system. We created files, our file types are large and complex and all of that, and then we when we share it with the client, they used to call transmittals and they used to put them on a CD-ROM and FedEx it to them and put a transmittal layer on top of that. What we see is that the world has changed, obviously, nobody wants the transmittal in FedEx in a CD-ROM anymore basically. That's just the technology world changing, but we also see the business world of construction is changing. 

Not only is the blurring boundary between internal and external. What used to be internal is external. What used to be external is internal. It drives enterprise teams crazy and that there's not a clear definition of the internal and external. It's always a blooding boundary. We see this as an opportunity. How do we take that and embrace that not as a constraint, but as an opportunity. How do we bring in that entire ecosystem of players into a single application framework that we can all be sitting and talking about the exact same content regardless of whether you're an employer, a designer at Perkin's and Will in our London office or in our Chicago office, or you're a partner, or you're the end user plan. It doesn't matter who you are, internal or external, you are all looking at the same thing at the same time.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. It's amazing how many customers I've talked to are still in the world of actually shipping CD-ROMs or hard drives or something like that.

Murali:  We used to do that not a few years ago.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. It's still common and it gets so much more complex when you have so many different people to work with. You decided then that you were going to go and build an application to streamline this especially for your customers and your direct clients. Tell us a little bit about what you were looking for in the platforms you wanted to choose for that.

Murali:  As I mentioned like internal and external, there's blooding boundaries. Whenever we look for partners like Okta and Box or anyone in the Cloud space because we realized that this cannot be done on-prem. We knew that, we're not going to go into that space anymore. We always look for partners that are not building products, but build platforms. That's the first thing, no product, look to platforms because it's important for us to look at platforms that can scale with us as we go around the globe. 

The second thing that we look for is can we have a so called, you call it platform solution, a white table solution, design, in a design form. Design is very important to us. We can't roll out an application that's using a first party application because anyone can go and get a Box application or an Okta application. We really are embracing the idea of can we put the design on a presentation layer on top that we can own as Perkin's and Will that shows a brand and shows the experiences through Perkin's and Will's, but behind the scenes it's a platform hopefully it's Okta on its entirety. We don't have to worry about it and Box running content so that we don't have to worry about it.

Also, Box and Okta worry about both the internal and the external side because we can't differentiate the internal and external anymore. We always look for platforms that can do both internal, not internal or external. This distant class solutions that can do internal really well or external really well. I would, some might have said, there's not a whole lot of solutions that can do both really well, and Okta may be one of them and Box might one of them.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. It's interesting because I mentioned earlier people are using many of these other microservices for things like Twilio for communication or Stripe for payments or something. Those are usually for interaction of people outside your company, but the Box and Okta solutions are one of the unique ones where you really get a lot of benefit by having a unified platform that can work for the internal and external. 

Murali:  Right and I think of it as you mentioned like at the AEC space, how we design projects and build projects is a very watered down space. Things change pretty quickly. Teams come in suddenly and teams leave suddenly and sometimes we engage a lot of more employees within the firm to work on projects. Content changes very quickly, but at the baseline level we need complete this ability and management of internal and external content, which are into place this management team needs basically.

That idea of having a platform where content is in a central place and how it gets shared internally or externally, internal teams and external teams, is on us to figure out, but it's very wild that it changes, but the idea of having two platforms, one doing internal-external just complicates it basically. You don't want too much complication in our lives.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. I understand you might be able to show us the latest demo.

Murali:  In a little bit, and I hope it works.

Rand Wacker:  Give it a try. It might cut over to the phone. I've got a couple more questions after this, but we'll have a little bit of time if folks in the audience will have some questions.

Murali:  Do you mind if I move this? Okay.

Rand Wacker:  That should come up. 

Murali:  I hope my wife doesn't text me right on the same.

Rand Wacker:  These are live demos on conference systems. Well, we'll see how things go.

Murali:  We'll see how it goes. See if it crashes, then blame on Okta, no Stacey. The idea of what people that are interested in Okta and Box, use case and then about how Okta fitting into this puzzle. The idea is, as I mentioned to build up compelling user experience. This is not a downstream application for perhaps the trades and all that. It's an upstream application because the dean of the medical center, is an example, is who we are focusing on like can be a cleared engaging applications that make people feel good about the projects that we are delivering for them.

This is a reference application for our own design in our own building, Wrigley building in Chicago, which is where I live. The first place that you see is that it gives you, using Box as a content management framework, gives you a notification of what's new, which is very important to the clients. You immediately get a feel for here is the new schematic design presentation, or here is a new rendering that the design firm has done. You'll see some information about the project.

Most design projects are started much like any other project, started on three big constraints, is it on schedule, budget, and goals. A one-step view, which is again powered by Box, I hope it works, of what is a schedule, where are we in the schedule. Again, behind the scenes is Box, but hopefully knows that it's Box. Then if people want to, beyond the dashboard, how is it going. I can view the first project and the second project pretty quickly. I can also go to the project and here is a set of so called notifications. Final of the 16th floor stairs. I can get a feel for what's going on.

Again, I'm the sponsor. I'm the user here. I can get a feel for what's going on. Somebody uploaded something, I can see it. I can see a bunch of documents because we are a very content heavy industry. Contracts, artifice, submittles, but a lot of very cool stuff like a lot pictures, a lot of images, a lot of renderings. I can see them all here. We haven't done this yet, but we'll try to add contract management, echosign or DocuSign so clients can sign documents and contracts all from within the context of a single app.

The most interesting is the design, which are all pretty pictures usually. Hope it shows up. Here are all the cool stuff, including just not photos, and renderings, and plants and all of that, but also videos and drone videos and all of that. We think that the compelling experience is then the dean can show it to his or her colleagues in a board meeting. Here is the progress of the project that we are building and they can show it without us in the room. They can show it to anyone that they want to, their closest friends, their closest allies, their colleagues, their board members, and all of that.

The last thing that they had was we were thinking about access to the team is most important. Just a quick access to I need to call somebody. The last thing that they has, which was much very unique to Perkin's and Will is can they fill out a survey about progress on this project right from within the app because our senses and our clients are very busy people. They have no appetite for more than a single application. Anything that they do has to belong in a single application somehow. 

Here is where the client logs in. Used the Okta model, depending on who the client is, if they are an ecosystem partner, they may see some of the things, they may not see certain things. If it's the executive sponsor, they may see the high level topics, but not the downstream orifice if you may, but if they're a contractor, they may see those also. Okta is going to generally a wide the security layer, the authentication, and who gets to see what, the authorization layer if you may.

Then Box holds all the content, and then at the end of the day, it's still a single application because we have done many research with many clients. They don't have appetite for going to Box and Slack and in Okta. They don't have it. They just want to go in one place and if they can see everything on the project out of one place, that to us the Holy Grail, and that's the attempt that we are trying to create.

Rand Wacker:  This is really cool and it shows off your business as you present it in an application that makes a lot of sincere users. It's very streamlined. We see people doing that across a lot of industries like the hospitality industry, or in real estate, people are building things like this and then classically, you might have insurance agents that are trying to redo the way their working in the field and all those things. All of these, I love seeing the files and the content. You have that plus button where people could add their own idea. We have people that will now take 360 degree videos and photos with Box and throw those in or 3D renderings and whatnot.

Murali:  One thing that we're good at as an industry is generating content. We are very content hungry. We don't have any issues with generating content, especially cool content. Clearly these applications start to sync pretty quickly once you have real cool content. Content rise most applications and the content being Box and secured by Okta, it just helps us focus on content and not worry about the other two, and how do you manage content? How do you sync your content? How do you secure content? Who gets to see what and all of that. That's not for us to worry about. Hopefully. That's for somebody else to worry about.

Rand Wacker:  What's been the reaction from your clients?

Murali:  Really good. We've built projects based on this idea and that's the idea, so we generate better sales by showing something that real. There is a vacuum for this in the industry, in our industry at least, in the AEC industry. There's a lot of so called downstream applications that can deal with constructions and some of those and all that, but there's not a whole lot of upstream applications where you can present something to a client and wow them and say, "Wow. This is a digitally engaged application." The use of to finally during the sales cycle as doing what.

Rand Wacker:  Interesting. You're using this not just for the project management, after something's done, but to show them what the experience they're be going through it. 

Murali:  Yeah. Clients are usually wowed by, "Wow. This is pretty cool. I can see everything right from my sofa on a Saturday morning." That's what they like. 

Rand Wacker:  Yeah. That's really cool. Any questions from the audience? Yes, please.

Speaker 4:  Where does the content and the security intersect?

Rand Wacker:  The question was, where is the content and the security intersect and particularly probably what Box and Okta are playing in here?

Speaker 4:  Yeah.

Rand Wacker:  Cool.

Murali:  Just to complicate that slightly and then you can ask where the internal end and where does external begin, and where does external end, and where internal begin. That's a journey to go through. Our thinking is that content stays in Box, period. Okta pose security and access and all of that, and then we signed up all in with both Box and Okta, I think play well together. There is a portioning aspect of Okta where the application can based on what's portioned push the security model all the way to the fuller level in Box. 

We do lots of projects like thousands of projects a month or a year or something. It's almost impossible to manually track, which folder has access to what because it will kill all [inaudible 00:35:11] doing it, but the beauty of Box and Okta being both Cloud based ecosystems and fundamentally playing nice to each other, helps us get there and try security through Okta, push the Box, and then when we something visible on the enterprise somewhere here, are in the place directly here, and they see something fishy on the Box side, they can go back to Okta and that can go both ways, but the goal is to get to a complete automation so we don't get worried.

Rand Wacker:  That's in a really important mind shift where instead of thinking about I've got files that might be strewn all over the place on different laptops, by centralizing it having one place where you can track and manage and report on. You get much better visibility and control over your content and clearly you can build really powerful applications on top of that. Yes, please.

Speaker 5:  You store your office [inaudible 00:36:01]?

Murali:  We don't. We sort everything except stuff that request on-site capabilities. Revit is one of those, and again just for people in the room that don't know, don't understand AEC. We design building models basically. We have engineering centric. We use Autodesk Revit software to draw the building model in 3D and these are huge 3 gig, 4 gig files, and latency is an issue. We generally run on Revit on-prem using soft Revit's design and engineer to run Revit, but when we're ready to ship is where Box comes in, but other documents like Word documents, and power points, and rendering, and PDF files, all of that Box becomes native. It's a single source of truth for us basically, but then for Revit, we had to store it in entirely because Revit is just engineered for ... it can't have latency. You can't put it in the Cloud.

I wish we can put it in the Cloud. Autodesk is one of our partners in doing this. Autodesk has an APA, 4G APA. They are building a 4G APA where you take a Revit a model, push it through the 4G APA, convert to a lightweight model, and bring it to the application if you may. That's something that we're already working with Autodesk on of can we run this through, bring it back to Box and put a lightweight viewer for clients to actually see the model. You'll know it's not Revit, it feels like Revit.

Speaker 5:  Yeah. We support files of 15 gig plus and going even higher pretty soon, and a lot of people will do that for uploading large video files, large images, thing in largest data sets, things where they can download it in one batch that we're working on and actually partnering with folks on the random access piece especially as you might shift something from on-prem to the Cloud and being able to do that random access low latency pieces. Yes, please.

Speaker 6:  Just the workflow of your wrap. The user launches this app, and they authenticate through Okta or is it through your app that has Okta working in the back end?

Murali:  The latter. We don't want clients to think about Okta. 

Rand Wacker:  They don't even see Okta. Got you. 

Murali:  That's the goal for us basically.

Speaker 6:  Then depending on their login, they're authenticate. Where are your permissions for the content in Box for what they can see? You do all that in Box as well?

Murali:  We do that on the Box, yes.

Speaker 6:  Okay. There's no other separate behind the scene database, you're managing permission?

Murali:  No. They have these additional layers like feedback layer or whatever. Our idea is to and then for feedback we use spike form or whatever, but those are the simple ones. The application's going to live and die by content for the most part. Content that's in files. The rest of them are generally easy. We're not a very transactional oriented industry. We want to generate a lot of content and share it with clients. Content fundamentally drives the whether the application's [inaudible 00:38:45] or not. If people don't see good, latest content, they won't use the application.

Rand Wacker:  Yeah and we're using something like Box and Okta for the internal and external piece. You can have that very seamless, white labeled authentication and experience for people outside the company, but we also then have customers that build apps like this and then the internal users and I think you're doing this as well, use just the Box native application to share content very seamlessly with folks outside. 

Speaker 7:  Just piggy backing on the same question. The roles and the data retention policies, you're not storing any of that in Okta, all is stored in Box?

Murali:  We are storing them in Box today. Yeah and we've been looking at the Okta platform. The platform side of Okta, and trying to figure out can we marry these together in a much more seamless way. We are storing these in Box today. These are passing the credentials back from Okta to Box, but that's an area of the discovery we've been parking to the Okta platform people, the recent acquisition of Stormpath. We see some compelling opportunities there to optimize disposal, but our goal is a pretty simple goal. We don't want to deal with any of these if you may. We just to generate content, put them on the right place, control it somewhere, and then let the users experience them, but behind the scenes is running Okta and Box as a part, if that makes sense to you.

Now, it's Johnny I think and again, one of the things that I've been telling Rand is that part, and I mentioned early on, we are a design firm. We don't pretend to be a technology firm and we are not a technology firm. Part of the investment that we make both from the internal and external side with Box and on Okta, is not just today's investment, it's a longer period of time, beacon try the innovation of the bandwagon of Okta and Box. If Box comes with something new, we insisted they tell us right away. 

If Okta comes up with something new, we insisted they tell us right away so we can try to see if we can apply that to our application on HBS. Rather than trying to figure it out on our own basically. We'd rather wait till it's figured out, rather than trying to do something you're not on. 

Rand Wacker:  Any other questions? It's a great conversation. Please, yes at the back. Might get a mic over. Thank you.

Speaker 8:  Is Box your like you place your over or is compliment with all servers?

Murali:  It compliments a file server only because of Revit because our files are much bigger than perhaps what the cloud can handle today. Hopefully, it's just a question of time before that gets resolved, but until then, they have a transition point where we still have our old files that store the Revit files. Revit, that's another discussion for another day and then we have Media environments, Citrix, we have all of those to handle the large Revit files, but the key differentiation I want to make is that every other file can be in Box. Things that require lodger engineering, and lodger like in a locally felt presence will stay in a file system, like they have 10 years ago, but when it's ready to be shared, we don't still allow people internally into access like a real network. In Revit, we share, we just push it to the Box by a form share it from there.

Rand Wacker:  For all the other file types, we have many customers that are fully replacing their on-prem net apps and filer systems, and then we also just released a new application called Box Drive where you can actually mount your Box account as a network file share and it'd be exactly the same user experience people might have from going to those team shares, but now you have mobile access anywhere you are. You can share externally and you get all the security of Box built in. 

Speaker 9:  You do have the same [brand 00:42:30] with where you have the power [inaudible 00:42:31]?

Rand Wacker:  Yeah, for a lot of different use cases. We can talk about it offline as well. I think we are about at time. We're getting to hook now, but we'll be here for the rest of the conference and then we can chat afterwards as well. I would invite you, we have a booth it's the first one you'll see as you walk into the expo. We're there all day. We've got a lot of folks that have a lot of good information if you want and be happy to talk more afterwards. Thank you very much.