Transforming higher education with cloud content management
Over the past few years, Box has been committed to finding ways to bring innovative technology to higher education, and has become the cloud content management solution of choice for hundreds of leading colleges and universities.
After five years leading the research and education community’s engagement with cloud service providers at Internet2, I am thrilled to join Box as Managing Director for Higher Education. I am looking forward to further driving Box’s commitment to its college and university customers as well as look for new ways to transform research and education globally.
My focus in this newly-created role is to develop and execute the strategy that brings cloud content management to hundreds more leading colleges and universities. Inside of Box, I’ll be articulating educational customers’ needs and requirements. In the community, I’ll be identifying ways in which campuses can benefit from cloud content management by facilitating collaboration and sharing use cases within Higher Education and between our community and other key industries like Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Government.
Five years ago, Internet2 brought together a group of visionary campus IT leaders from 8 campuses to develop Box’s relationship with the US Higher Education community and establish the first enterprise cloud service facilitated by Internet2. We set up a partnership structure that ensures ongoing stewardship by the campuses, resulting in sustained strategic engagement between Higher Education leadership and Box that is now poised for future growth.
Why is the cloud more important than ever for higher ed?
Colleges and universities are facing increasing financial and administrative pressures in addition to the day to day needs of their faculty, researchers, and students. Aging IT infrastructure is a significant problem that gets in the way of important teaching, research, and operational activities. Simultaneously, because of the so-called “consumerization of IT” and rapid pace of technological innovation students are coming to campus with increasingly high expectations of the technology provided to them. Cloud content management will be a critical part of campus leadership responses to these pressures as they look to deploy best-in-class enterprise tools that incorporate global scale and rapid pace of innovation while simultaneously being intuitive for end users without sacrificing administrative controls necessary for security and compliance.
Building on Box’s existing higher education enterprise footprint
Not only in the United States but also in other countries around the world, higher education is deploying Box to help transform the student experience, operations, administration, teaching, and research. Today, there is a growing group of universities deploying Box, including long-standing large enterprise customers like Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and Pennsylvania State University with over 100,000 users each and new customers just beginning to realize the benefits of cloud content management.
Box Platform & the future of higher education cloud content management
In the fall of 2015, Box announced Box Platform, which allows customers, partners and ISVs to build and deploy apps without the end user knowing they’re operating on Box. With so many talented students, faculty, and staff developers in the community, there’s already fairly heavy utilization of Box’s APIs. Adding this capability to an already rich set of APIs positions Box as a centralized repository for all research and education content. I see tremendous untapped opportunity for colleges and universities, as well as partners, ISVs, and startups working with the community, to support educational transformation and digital scholarship though next-generation teaching and learning applications built on Box Platform.
