Box this week unveiled a new initiative designed to help developers generate revenue more easily from enterprise apps based on its platform.
The cloud content, collaboration and storage firm has dubbed the programme Box $rev. It will measure user interaction with third-party apps based on the Box platform and pay developers accordingly up to 15 per cent of a Box seat price.
With more than 15 million users 150,000 of which are businesses, including 92 per cent of the Fortune 500 and 25,000 developers with an appetite for the platform, the time is ripe for such an initiative, according to Chris Yeh, Box's vice platform vice president.
"We're at that point of maturity where it is now becoming important for us to help people monetise directly. This is the right time as we're at that critical mass now over 500 apps in OneCloud, 25,000 developers on the platform it's extremely busy. We're just at that stage in development where we really want to put real money behind the things we're doing with developers so they feel they're getting assistance and visibility but actually making money too," he told IT Pro.
"That's not to say we don't help developers monetise today... We just want to continue to build on that over time. That's why we are announcing Box $rev."
Box $rev is launching with 10 partners initially but plans to grow this numbers just as rapidly as its overall business is expanding. Revenue is linked to usage at present but may expand to offer monetary gain linked to other user activities in the future, according to Box.
The full list of launch partners: CamScanner, CloudOn, Documents by Readdle, GenuisScan, GoodNotes, iAnnotate, Notability, Outline+, PDFExpert and SmartOffice.
"Box $rev is an exciting first step that allows developers to begin monetising their apps in the enterprise without the need for new versions or complicated changes to pricing models," said Ravi Bhatt, CEO of iAnnotate parent company Branchfire.
"We have over a million users of the consumer version of iAnnotate and this program allows us to realise additional revenue when customers use Box."
In addition to the revenue-generation scheme, Box has also announced new enterprise software development kits (SDKs) for the Android and iOS platforms. These new kits solve two key enterprise problems, according to Yeh: That of single sign-on and of development time. Indeed, development time can be reduced from days to mere hours, he said.
"The question is: How do we drive more value for developers?' People are really interested in working with us and we're clearly growing really quickly, so how do we get people to make money with us as they build applications on Box?," Yeh added.
"I spend a lot of time working with our third-party ecosystem of developers. We believe if we can build a really large number of developers around our platform that a lot of good things will happen good applications will be built, our customers will be happier, there will be lots of new opportunities for innovation. All of these things are part of the philosophy of building our third-party ecosystem."
