Contact: Brenon Daly
Box hasn’t been a buyer. The enterprise file-sharing and collaboration startup has only inked one acquisition in its history, and that deal was done exactly three years ago. Meanwhile, the market is rapidly consolidating around it, with both big and small buyers rounding out their technology portfolios. Just this year alone, Box’s consumer market rival, Dropbox, has inked three purchases.
It’s not like Box can’t afford to go shopping. Earlier this summer, the startup pulled in $125m in fresh funding, bringing its total amount raised to $287m. But so far, it hasn’t put that toward M&A, preferring instead to partner with a wide swath of companies. Indeed, partnerships are a major theme at BoxWorks 2012, its ongoing annual customer conference. At the two-day event, Box announced partnerships with Proofpoint for data loss prevention and GoodData for analytic dashboards, along with other initiatives.
Part of what has kept Box out of the market is that it has sought to establish itself as an open, inclusive platform vendor. As part of that strategy, companies tend to favor integration ahead of acquisition.
But there comes a point for many companies when they need to own the technology outright. For cloud stalwart salesforce.com, that point came when the company hit its seventh year in business, which is where Box finds itself now. In the half-decade since then, salesforce.com has reeled off 26 deals that have taken it far beyond its core sales force automation product and helped create some $21bn of the company’s market value.
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