Barely four months after teaming up to help organizations make more out of the growing amounts of information they store in the public cloud, IBM Corp. and Box Inc. are releasing a new set of analytics capabilities to augment the latter’s online file locker. The launch is the latest milestone in an aggressive data management initiative tracing back two years to an unassuming startup acquisition.

Box picked up dLoop Inc. in late 2013 for its content discovery software and relaunched the technology 11 months later as a native component of its platform promising to help automate the logistics of handling disparate business data in a large enterprise setting. The partnership with IBM extends that functionality to organizations’ on-premise applications.

Content Navigator, the first of the four solutions rolling out as part of the launch, allows enterprise developers to make files kept in Box accessible directly from their software and provide users with the means to find the specific items needed for their work. That search feature is coupled with sharing options, functionality that is expanded upon in the second service that IBM is introducing.

Case Manager is designed to make files available to outside stakeholders like partners and contractors with the appropriate controls, which includes providing additional information when necessary. It’s complemented by a repackaged version of the data governance software Big Blue gained through its acquisition of StoredIQ Inc. in 2013 that has been adapted for Box.

That enables organizations to identify what information their employees keep in the service as well as how it’s used, which is handy for detecting privacy violations like, say, a manufacturing partner having access to files from a project they’re no longer involved with. Similarly to Content Navigator, the technology works with on-premise data as well.

Besides affording administrators the convenience of a unified interface, that also helps find new files that an organization would be interested in moving to Box, which is where the fourth and final component of the IBM-powered suite comes into play. Datacap is another asset gained through the company’s aggressive acquisition strategy that helps automate the discovery and extraction process.

All that functionality should provide a valuable boost for Box’s efforts to diversify its value proposition beyond merely providing affordable cloud storage, while giving IBM direct access to the file sharing giant’s massive user base. And the alliance is only set to expand as the companies continue to develop new integrations through which to tap one another’s strengths.

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