Box Catches a Needed Break with Huge GE Deal

Cloud storage provider Box, on the heels of postponing its much anticipated IPO last week, caught a huge public relations wave this week when mega-colossus General Electric (GE) signed on to use the company’s technology across its entire network of some 300,000 employees.

Neither company disclosed the price and duration of the deal but both were quick in the agreement’s aftermath to pat each other on the back. GE said Box will enable its employees to collaborate internally and externally with partners to leverage mobile, social and the cloud. And, in turn, Box chief executive Aaron Levie praised GE for its forward-looking posture on new technology, calling out in a blog post the company’s earlier adoption of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and iPad.

Jamie Miller, GE’s chief information officer, told the New York Times that the Box deal will enable a “team doing sales in Argentina, engineering in Schenectady, N.Y., and manufacturing in France [to] seamlessly integrate with each other and collaborate on the same product.”

Miller said GE expected to have Box deployed throughout the comnpany by the end of the year. “We’re diverse, we’re everywhere and we work at a huge scale—we need to work more with cloud computing,” she said.

The two companies have been working on the deal for nearly two years but the timing of GE’s endorsement of Box could hardly have been more fortuitous for the file sharing provider considering how only last week it backpedaled away from its IPO in a move that raised questions about the company’s long-term prospects.

Levie declined to provide details of the GE agreement but did call it “the largest rollout of Box” and “a key milestone” in the company’s nine-year history.

“We’ve been working with GE leadership for nearly two years to bring Box to their organization, and we’re delighted to announce this strategic relationship,” Levie wrote in a blog post.

“While GE has a long history of technology-driven innovation, few enterprises of its scale have reinvented themselves by putting information technology at the center of their competitive strategy,” he said. “The traditional model of IT simply doesn’t work in this new world.”

The GE win could demonstrate Box’s viability in the open market to investors but it’s not like the company has lacked big deals with a 65,000 seat license with Schneider Electric and a 30,000 seat deal with Proctor and Gamble under its belt. What the deal could show, however, is that the hype surrounding Box may disguise its ability to play seriously.