Cloud company Box has penned a deal to support 300,000 employees of Fortune 500 firm General Electric.
The contract, announced Thursday, represents a major win for the storage and collaboration tech business as it competes with rivals like Microsoft, Google and Dropbox for enterprise dominance.
Under the agreement, GE will use Box for collaboration and secure file-sharing between its 300,000-strong staff on computers, smartphones and tablets.
It also hopes to unify business information across applications and provide IT with the control and admin capabilities required to govern sensitive content on a large scale.
Box CEO Aaron Levie admitted the contract was the result of around two years’ work with the conglomerate, writing in a blog post: "We’re delighted to announce this strategic relationship.
"The traditional model of IT simply doesn’t work in this new world. Employees need to securely share corporate information from multiple devices.
"They need to collaborate not only with each other, but also with partners, customers, and vendors globally. And every worker, whether a corporate marketing leader or someone servicing a jet engine, needs access to data in real-time, from anywhere."
Levie has claimed that more than 35,000 developers are currently building on the Box platform, while use of third-party apps has increased 292% over the last year.
Box recently revealed it has a 25 million-strong user base – including 40% of Fortune 500 companies, though its accumulated deficit also stood at $361m at the start of 2014.
"In today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world, providing our employees with secure access to content at any time using any device is critical to creating a more productive, connected workforce," said Jamie Miller, senior VP and CIO of GE.
"Moving to a cloud technology like Box allows us to centralize all of our content and provides more efficiency, speed and simplicity for our employees."
Box filed for a $250m IPO in late March, but has since denied a Wall Street Journal report that it is delaying a stock market flotation until June at the earliest after Twitter’s shares fell 11%.
