More than 45 million people around the world use the Box cloud content management platform to solve simple and complex challenges, from sharing and accessing files on mobile devices to sophisticated business processes such as data governance and retention. Customers include AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G, and The GAP. In addition to its headquarters in Redwood City, Box has offices Canada, Sweden, U.K., Netherlands, Germany, France, Japan, and Australia.

Box’s mission is to make people more productive by allowing them to securely collaborate and share their ideas. The productivity of its own workforce is equally vital, and consequently, a strong focus of its IT team. “It’s our job to enable our employees to work as efficiently and effectively as possible,” says Mark Schooley, Director of IT Operations & Engineering at Box.

Productivity requires integration

When Schooley and his colleagues decided to consolidate Box’s communications infrastructure on a single UCaaS solution that could be used worldwide, productivity was never far from their minds. In particular, because Box runs its operations in the cloud, Schooley and his colleagues knew that integrations between the communications solution and critical applications such as Box, Google G Suite, Salesforce®, and Okta were essential to ensuring the productivity of the users.

“Switching between applications makes for a disjointed experience that reduces productivity,” explains Schooley. “In a cloud-based environment, integrations are a necessity. We wanted a UCaaS vendor that could support a large ecosystem of pre-built integrations, was integrated with IPaaS platforms, and had an open API.”

Shared cloud DNA and a fast rollout

Box chose RingCentral as its UCaaS solution because, with more than 125 integrations, it met the integration criterion. Also, as a cloud solution, RingCentral was a natural fit. “RingCentral was born in the cloud in the same way that Box was born in the cloud. The cloud is deep in our DNA, and we believe that RingCentral lives and breathes that as well,” says Schooley.

Box deployed RingCentral Global Office™ for telephony at its offices around the world as well as RingCentral Meetings™ for online video and audio conferencing. RingCentral Meetings replaces 10 different web conferencing and screen share solutions, many revolving around very expensive conference bridging.

RingCentral Professional Services™ assisted Box in the deployment, which Schooley says went very quickly, especially considering it involved multiple offices, reprogramming of numerous conference room phones, and more than 2,000 phone numbers to be ported. “The RingCentral Professional Services team is second to none, and the Customer Success team has been deeply involved in post-implementation follow-up,” he notes.

Box values that RingCentral continues to add functionality to its products. A recent example is quality of service (QoS), which enables IT to anticipate and diagnose voice-quality issues before they escalate to critical problems. “We have many global employees, and QoS helps us pinpoint international call patterns, along with a dashboard showing graphic representations of call quality,” says Schooley.

Productivity for individuals and benefits to the company as a whole

Individual users experience integration-driven productivity gains as soon as they sign on in the morning. The RingCentral-Okta integration enables logging in with standard Single Sign-on credentials and lets users access all their applications and tools, including all of the RingCentral communications functionality. (RingCentral for Okta also helps Schooley by enabling his team to quickly provision new users. “Onboarding new employees takes only minutes with RingCentral for Okta, versus days in the past,” says Schooley. “This is really helpful as we open new offices.”)

Productivity gains continue as users work with G Suite applications, Salesforce, and Box. For example, the RingCentral-Google integration (called RingCentral for Google) eliminates the disjointed experience of switching between applications by allowing users to make and receive calls, send text messages, schedule meetings, and more from within the G Suite applications. Similarly, the RingCentral-Salesforce integration (called RingCentral for Salesforce) means they can perform tasks such as clicking on a contact’s phone number in Salesforce to call that person.

RingCentral created an integration for Box that links RingCentral’s texting and faxing tools with the Box platform. “The ability to fax directly out of Box and SMS a Box link are important to us and to the customers we share with RingCentral,” Schooley adds.

In addition to individual users, Box as a whole sees productivity gains made possible by RingCentral. This is especially evident as Box expands internationally. “The underlying communications layer is critical as we reach out to customers and prospects in new regions, whether it’s a simple phone call, all the way through to sharing content online to pitch our solution,” Schooley explains. “It has been really important for us to consolidate on one solution globally. And with RingCentral, we can have the communications infrastructure for a new office ready in days, versus the weeks or months it would have taken us with a traditional PBX, or even hybrid PBX-cloud solution.”

“Box is an innovative, forward-thinking company and we look for the same in our partners,” says Paul Chapman, CIO, Box. “RingCentral has proven to be a great partner for us.”