October 12, 2017

Box Dives Into Intelligent Content Analytics with Launch of Box Skills

by Jim Lundy

Summary: On October 11th, 2017, Box Announced Box Skills, its new Intelligent Content Analytics (ICA) offering that upon launch will be able to analyze text, voice, image, and video content.

Event: At its seventh annual BoxWorks Customer Event, Box announced Box Skills, its ICA offering, along with other offerings, such as the shipment of its Box Relay Workflow Service.

Box announced Box Skills at BoxWorks 2017 in San Francisco (image: Box, of Box headquarters in Redwood City, CA).

Analysis

By adding Intelligent Content Analytics to its Content Platform, Box opens up the use cases for its offering and puts standalone Analytics Providers on notice. The fact that Box is tackling all aspects of Content Analytics (i.e. Text, Voice, Images, and Video) gives it a feature lead. This move will force consolidation.

What Is Box Skills?

Box Skills is a new offering from Box that provides what Aragon calls Intelligent Content Analytics. Box is leveraging Artificial Intelligence from multiple sources to deliver this capability. These sources include licensing algorithms from Google, IBM, and Microsoft Azure.

Box Skills will include the following analytics features:

Entity Analysis
Topic Extraction
Concept Detection
Sentiment Analysis
Image Labels
Handwriting Detection
Audio Analytics
Video Analysis
Intelligent Security

The Document Analytics is being provided by partner Ephesoft, which has built a new Box Skill that can detect information in document or contracts. Aragon feels that Box may want to do more in this area themselves given the demand for Contract Analytics.

What Is Intelligent Content Analytics?

Intelligent Content Analytics refers to the use of analytics to derive insights from content where the text, voice, image, video, or a higher level abstraction of meaning – called a concept – has been organized in a model that can be mechanically processed. Intelligent Content Analytics generally includes but provides more value than simple text analytics, because it can help with predictions and analysis based on these higher level concepts.

The Market for ICA Will Reach $ U.S. 10 Billion

Aragon believes that there are unlimited use cases for ICA, particularly in repetitive business processes, such as Claims Management, Contracts Management, and many others. As such, we have forecasted that the market for ICA will reach over U.S. $10 Billion by 2025.

Box Graph Adds Visualization

Box also announced Box Graph, which will be able to show what we call a Document Network Analysis of how documents are being used within a firm. The initial offering called Box Feed provides the most relevant insights, updates, and content for each Box user. This is similar to what Delve does in Office 365. Box Graph positions Box well versus Microsoft. Others in Content Management have not done much with regard to visual analytics.

Box Relay Ships; New Workflow Partners Gained

With the new Content Analytics offering, Box Skills, Box now has more solutions to offer because of its new capabilities. Besides Analytics, Box is also shipping its Box Relay Workflow product, which is a joint offering with IBM.

Box is also partnering with more third parties. New partners such as Nintex and K2 were present at the BoxWorks Solution Pavilion during BoxWorks 2017. Our take is that enterprises want workflow but they also want Content Automation (see Workflow and Content Automation: The Smart Way Forward).

Box as a Content Platform Will Attract SIs

All of this combined means that Box is now a more Complete Cloud Content Platform than in the past. The new opportunities that Box Skills will enable will attract new Sis that want to deliver unique Solutions on top of the Box standard APIs and the new ones that are part of Box Skills.

Aragon Advisory

Intelligent Content Analytics is a new category that goes beyond aspects of creating and storing content. Enterprises should evaluate the use cases that ICA can offer.
With Box Skills, Box is now a provider of ICA and given the breadth of capabilities, it should be evaluated, along with others.
Enterprises should begin the tedious process of minimizing the number of content repositories they have and develop a 3 year migration plan.

Bottom Line

The Intelligent Content Analytics market is here and Box is now one of the providers in this emerging market. Enterprises should look at Content strategically for ways to find both revenue opportunities and compliance risk – both of which can be identified when an ICA Platform is deployed.