Mining Company Anglo American Opts for Box

Box.com (UK) Ltd announced that Anglo American plc, one of the world’s largest mining companies, is bringing Box’s cloud content sharing and collaboration platform to 10,000 distributed employees.

Anglo American chose Box to address both the users’ need for internal and external collaboration and remote access to critical business documents, as well as IT’s requirements for centralized management and security.

Anglo American is a global mining company headquartered in London, UK. It is the world’s largest producer of platinum, with around 40% of world output, and a producer of diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and metallurgical and thermal coal. The company’s operations and exploration activities span Southern Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.

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

“A company’s ability to securely share and manage information can be the difference between winning and losing in today’s increasingly competitive market,” said David Quantrell, Box GM of EMEA. “Anglo American’s deployment underscores the adoption we’ve seen WW as businesses turn to Box to help increase speed and productivity with the enterprise-grade security and mobile controls IT needs with the simplicity that users gravitate toward.“

Anglo American’s evaluation of cloud platforms was driven by the need for external collaboration, extended content management, mobile access to information and storage for the company’s social platform, Jive. With previous systems, employees were limited to internal file sharing and found it challenging to share critical content externally with mining providers, legal firms and consultants. Employees also lacked mobile and offline access to content, which is especially challenging for those based in locations that have limited Internet connectivity.

Anglo American’s Global Solutions Team was tasked with finding a single service for file sharing, mobile access and external collaboration, while tightening up content security, as it was imperative that the company’s data not be spread out unevenly across the web. The team began evaluating cloud-based solutions that provided enterprise-grade security, integration capabilities to on-premise and cloud solutions, such as Jive, and the ability to sync business content across all devices for effective backup and offline and mobile access. Box met these requirements.

By partnering closely with Box on the pilot roll out, the Global Solutions Team made the decision to let Box usage spread organically across multiple business units and in the past six months has experienced a 3,000-user adoption rate. Box solves the company’s needs and provides the administration and control capabilities required to protect sensitive content for moving on to the next phase of the deployment. This phase includes getting the company’s 9,000 laptop users in areas with limited Internet connectivity, like Africa and Latin America, using Box as a way to synchronize and backup their data for offline access and BC.

Similar to Box’s values, Anglo American places an emphasis on creating environments that foster productivity and supports a digital workplace. Box makes it for 225,000 businesses around the world to share and collaborate across devices, while also providing IT with an administrative interface for reporting and managing business information.

Other global brands using Box include Procter & Gamble, McAfee, Schneider Electric and Pearson.