What to expect from Boxworks 2019

Some 6,000 IT professionals are descending on San Francisco this week for Box's annual conference, where digital transformation and collaboration are on the agenda.

Marking its ninth year in the city, delegates and speakers at the conference will explore how enterprises can transform their business by streamlining operations. The event, hosted at the Moscone Centre, will kick off with a keynote from CEO Aaron Levie, who will be waxing lyrical about the future of work and how cloud management powers intelligent enterprise.

Joining him on stage will be IBM's CEO, Ginni Rometty, who will be talking about all things content and digital transformation. Big Blue is a regular fixture at Boxworks and it's highly likely there will be announcements and details about work the two companies are looking to get into in 2020.

Levie will also be joined by award-winning director Ryan Coolger. Nothing has been announced and the reason for his attendance is shrouded in secrecy, but I have fingers crossed for some Black Panther 2 details/footage that would be marvellous!

Box will have a second celebrity on site, too, with football star Abby Wambach attending the Women's networking luncheon. As well as being the all-time leading international goalscorer (that's for men and women), she is also an activist for equality and inclusion.

Taking it back to tech, there's a real focus on communication platforms this year with the CEOs of both Slack and Zoom attending. Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Slack, has enjoyed a rapid rise over the last few years thanks to his company's popularity with startups. It's been heavily linked to the "always-on" culture, with suggestions that it enables unhealthy work habits, but its popularity also highlights how well received the platform has been by businesses.

Zoom, on the other hand, is a little less well known, but still very popular with startups. CEO Eric Yuan will be attending as a speaker and we assume he'll be discussing the latest innovations his video conferencing platform has to offer.

Many of the 6,000 or so attendees will be riding across the Golden Gate Bridge in an Uber for the conference and the ride sharing app will have a representative at the event. Head of information technology, Shobhana Ahluwalia will be speaking at the event, presumably discussing the recent changes to the company's app, which is now an integrated platform for both the transport and food delivery services.

This is likely what we can really expect from Boxworks over the next two days; discussions about simplifying services in the cloud from those that have done it.