Box officials say they're excited about the interest in their service. The BoxWorks event has grown from about 400 attendees last year to more than 1,700 this year, while paid Box business accounts have grown from 120,000 to 140,000 in the past six months and now 92% of Fortune 500 businesses are in some ways using the Box platform, even if it's individual employees within those companies.

The rhetoric back and forth among vendors, Lepofsky says, points to the maturing and fast-developing industry of cloud storage. But he believes Box's platform announcements today could give the company a significant leg up. "It's a smart move," he says. "IBM is going to have collaboration tools and Oracle and SAP will each roll out their own sets, too." Box opening up its platform will not only expand the reach of Box to more applications, but it will allow additional functionality on the box platform. "That's going to allow Box to show up in a lot more places," he says, noting this is key to even further adoption within the enterprise.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.