According to a Verified Market Research report, the global enterprise collaboration market was valued at $29.45 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to $53.26 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of over 8%. However, the recent COVID-19 driven virtual working conditions have accelerated the growth in this market. Box (NYSE: BOX) continues to add capabilities and integrations to its offerings to meet this growing demand.

Box’s Financials

Box’s third-quarter revenues grew 10.64% over the year to $196 million, ahead of the market’s expectations by 1.01%. Billings grew 7.9% to $185.5 million. On an adjusted basis, the company reported an EPS of $0.20, ahead of the market’s forecast of an EPS of $0.14.

For the current year, Box raised its revenues forecast to $768-$769 million and increased its EPS forecast to $0.64-$0.66. Box expects to end the fourth quarter with revenues of $196-$197 million and an EPS of $0.16-$0.18. The market expects revenues of $768.7 million and an EPS of $0.58 for the year and revenues of $198.7 million and an EPS of $0.15 for the fourth quarter.

Box’s Product Upgrades

During the quarter, Box announced new capabilities and integrations for its products that enhance its ability to assist customers with bringing content and business processes together, reducing risk while improving collaboration and simplifying the ability to get work done securely. The new features include annotation capabilities to make collaboration in real-time easier. For its offering of Box Rely, it expanded the custom templates and announced API extensibility, allowing customers to connect workflows from Box to applications such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, in addition to custom applications. It also announced its new policy exception capability and Microsoft integration to protect information flowing between Microsoft 365 and Box for Box Shield.

Additionally, it announced enhancements to Box and Microsoft teams with new features that make sharing and accessing content from Box through the Microsoft Teams app easier. The integration allows users to unify content across teams and other apps. It follows the increased amount of integration work Box has been doing with Slack, making sure customers are able to access any content from Slack channels seamlessly.

The current pandemic has accelerated the demand for applications and products that support work-at-home capabilities. Collaboration has become even more important. Box realizes that today customers are using and will be using multiple applications such as Slack, SalesForce, Teams, WebEx, and Zoom to get their work done. They will need secure access to their content from these applications. Enterprises need a single source of truth for their content across their IT stack. Box is focusing on becoming the singular content layer that connects these applications. It offers more than 1,500 integrations and continues to expand its open and interoperable platform by creating a seamless experience for its customers.

Box realizes the importance of a PaaS strategy. It has an open platform that provides developers with the ability to build apps and create integrations with SDKs for their programming language, a command-line interface, front-end UI elements, and much more. It also has an app marketplace that allows third-party developers to build apps and list them in the App Gallery to find new users. Box does not disclose usage statistics about its apps or its third-party developers. I have written earlier about the importance of a PaaS strategy for SaaS players. Read my recent article Cloud Stocks: Which SaaS Players Will Win in PaaS.

Box’s stock is currently trading at $17.68 with a market capitalization of $2.8 billion. It touched a high of $22.09 in June last year. It has recovered from a year low of $8.64 that it had fallen to in March last year.