The Cloud Goes to School: More Than 85 Universities Adopt Box to Help Students, Faculty and Administrators Share and Manage Content

LOS ALTOS, CA, Jan 09, 2013 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Box today announced that more than 85 higher education institutions have adopted Box's cloud collaboration service to help their communities of students, faculty, and staff access, share and manage content online and from mobile devices. In the past year alone, the number of Box customers in the education sector has doubled, with some of the nation's leading universities adopting Box. To support its university-focused initiative, Box also partnered with Internet2, the world's most advanced networking consortium, to provide top institutions, including Cornell, Notre Dame, Stanford and University of Michigan, with a simple way to deploy Box across their entire campuses.

"No group of people are more savvy and comfortable with web and mobile technologies than students," said Whitney Bouck, general manager of enterprise at Box. "Universities are moving away from legacy systems and pushing aggressively towards software that's built for a post-PC world and meets the expectations of their students.

We're thrilled to be working with a growing group of higher education institutions that are making it easy for their communities to work, learn and collaborate together in new ways." Box partnered with Internet2 to offer U.S. universities a secure and simple way to deploy Box across their entire campus communities.

Since the launch of the Internet2 NET+ Box program in April 2012, more than 1 million Box accounts have been purchased across the 32 participating universities. Early University adopters in process of rolling out the service campus-wide include, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Notre Dame, Stanford and UC Berkeley.

"At Cornell University, we are always looking for technology tools that will enhance our community's innovation, productivity and academic success. Box helps us meet these goals," said Ted Dodds, chief information officer and vice president at Cornell. "As an early adopter of the Internet2 NET+ Box program, we were able to bring a secure cloud storage and collaboration service to Cornell faster than if we rolled Box out on our own. Now, our faculty, staff and students can access and share content from any device, whether at Cornell or traveling abroad -- Box helps our community stay connected." "Notre Dame faculty and students consistently were asking for more storage and the ability to easily access and share information anytime, with anyone, from anywhere and on any device," said Ron Kraemer, vice president of IT and chief information officer at Notre Dame. "Through Box, we were able to address that request quickly and securely, and in the process, better serve teaching, learning, research and University operations." "We understand the cloud's potential to increase collaboration throughout our community, enable faster innovation and cut down on IT costs," said Laura McCain Patterson, chief information officer at University of Michigan. "In line with our long-term strategy for improving our campus IT environment, U-M recently became the first university to roll out Box campus-wide through our partnership with Internet2." The Internet2 NET+ Box program enables users to securely share, store and collaborate on content with anyone from any device, while providing for the needs of higher education institutions. These requirements include campus single sign-on, integration with campus account provisioning systems, and compliance with rigorous security requirements.

"Higher education is going through massive changes. With the shift in financial models and globalization, past technology acquisition models no longer work. There are too many costs, too much overhead and too much administration," said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president at Internet2. "The technology available to our community today gives us the opportunity to customize systems to meet our needs. Cloud technologies, like Box, deliver on the vision of seamless and lightweight applications that can be easily deployed and quickly adopted to enable the next generation of education." In addition to the Internet2 universities that have purchased Box for their entire campus, others implement Box for a diverse range of use cases in various departments, including Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy, Hunter College CUNY's Rehabilitation research group and Emory University's Office of Business Practice Improvement. For example, Emory University's Office of Business Practice Improvement uses Box to optimize workflow management and to access and share critical content from mobile devices internally and externally with partners all over the country.

"We literally have hundreds of files per project, and with a team spread all over the country, our biggest challenge was not only giving them access to content, but also knowing how to keep them organized and focused," said Jamie Smith, manager for Strategic Business Solutions, Innovations and Process Improvement at Emory University. "I'm a big believer in cloud-based solutions that you can access anywhere, anytime. With Box, we're able to optimize our workflow and keep everybody on track and working from the most current documents. By leveraging the Box admin tools, we're also able to know who's doing what and track user participation." To learn more about Box for Higher Education, please visit www.box.com/higher-ed.

About Box Founded in 2005, Box provides a secure content sharing platform that both users and IT love and adopt. Content on Box can be shared internally and externally, accessed through iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone applications, among others, and extended to partner applications such as Google Apps, NetSuite and Salesforce.

Headquartered in Los Altos, CA, Box is a privately held company and is backed by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, General Atlantic, Meritech Capital Partners, NEA, Scale Venture Partners, and U.S. Venture Partners, and strategic investors salesforce.com and SAP. To learn more about Box, visit www.box.com.

SOURCE: Box

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