Anglo American deploys Box to 10,000 employees around the world

Anglo American has rolled out cloud collaboration and storage service Box to 10,000 users around the globe, in a bid to eradicate connectivity issues and boost internal and external communication.

The mining giant, which is head-quartered in the UK, employs 100,000 people and is responsible for 40 per cent of the world's platinum output and a key producer of copper, diamonds, iron ore, metallurgical and thermal coal and nickel. It evaluated a number of cloud solutions, but ultimately decided on Box as it met core requirements and also integrated seamlessly with its existing social platform Jive, according to Whitney Bouck, Box's senior vice president of global marketing and general manager of enterprise.

"Anglo American was looking at content and collaboration platforms as it has a big need to work with outside contractors and suppliers. As such, external collaboration was a key driver for them in its evaluation of different offerings. There was also the internal Jive integration requirement. Those two coupled with its mobile needs were the three key drivers behind what it was looking for," she said.

"We fit quite well in those three areas. Previously it was very limited and had no means other than email to share files externally, which made things pretty difficult. Employees were also demanding a lot of mobile access to business content and tools.

Previously, laptop users (the company has 9,000 such workers), in particular, faced difficulties in areas of poor connectivity and users were limited to sharing files internally to ensure confidential information remained so, Bouck added. The Box implementation follows a six-month pilot carried out in 2013 and will cater for Anglo American's growing needs when it comes to content management, collaboration, storage and mobile access to key information.

The firm's IT department will also be able to centrally manage the solution, despite operations spanning Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America and Southern Africa.

“Sustainable development, efficiency and empowering a global workforce are the key initiatives that drive our business forward. When you create a more productive, connected workplace environment, communication thrives and everyone benefits,” said David Heppenstall, Anglo American's CIO.

“Moving to a cloud technology like Box that allows us to centralise all our content and provide a secure, simple and efficient tool for our employees was a natural fit for our company.”

Bouck added: "I think it's really great that we've got more examples of UK and European large-scale companies taking Box on as a standard in their organisations. It's perhaps a comforting thing for other UK-based customers."

Often, Box use within one company has a domino effect that spreads to deployments in partner organisations, according to Bouck. "Proctor and Gamble is a great example of this," she said.

"It started using Box in its marketing department who work with advertising and creative agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and so on. Then those companies became customers and started using Box with their customers. That external collaboration element is a really big connection point for getting other firms to follow suit."