Evolution by acquisition, decade over decade

With a 60+ year history, Broadcom is a bit of an icon in the semiconductor world. The company
started as the semiconductor division of HP, spun off into Agilent Technologies, divested as Avago,
started acquiring companies, and eventually became Broadcom as a result of one of these
acquisitions. Recently, the company acquired CA Technologies, Symantec, and VMware — which is
when they became a software company as well as the hardware scion they’ve been long known as.
Broadcom now operates in 68 countries with over 50,000 employees, a significant percentage of
whom are R&D engineers.

Stanley Toh, Head of Enterprise End User Services and Experience, handles technology decisions that
touch on things like identity access management, client services, IT support, compliance auditing, all
employee-facing technology, and anything having to do with collaboration. With employees spread all
over the world, Toh says, “Technology is very important to us in the ways it makes employees more
efficient and able to collaborate.”

Broadcom moved to Box more than 15 years ago, partly to better support these R&D engineers in
collaborating from around the world, every day. The work these engineers do is at the heart of what’s
made Broadcom’s acquisition strategy so successful, their security posture so strong, and their
company-wide workflows so efficient. Partnering with Box for “all things content” has played a key
role in all of these areas.

Navigating each unique M&A project with Box Consulting

In partnership with Box Consulting, Broadcom has made innovative use of the Intelligent Content
Cloud. As Toh says, “When you want to do a special project on Box, who do you call? You call the
experts — Box Consulting.”

With mergers and acquisitions, Broadcom inherits and has to absorb a lot of unstructured data, from
budget spreadsheets to marketing assets to HR onboarding docs and everything in between — all the
files every company produces, uses, and shares in the course of business. Box Consulting has helped
Broadcom come up with the best custom solutions for migrating that data from multiple acquisitions
over the years. Toh says, “When we engage Box Consulting and move everything from other
platforms into Box, not only are we able to move it quickly, and not worry about storage (because
Box takes care of that), but we preserve sharing and ownership.”

For the folks migrating from another company into Broadcom, the move is seamless. They don’t have
to reshare files, regrant access, or figure out where to put what. All of that is done for them as they
move into Box.

Major savings on infrastructure costs

As just one example, when Broadcom acquired LSI in 2014, 6,000 new employees migrated right into
Box. All of these accounts were online and ready to go the day the deal closed, proving that Box
could scale quickly and easily with Broadcom Limited’s growth, without incurring capital
expenditures. At this point in time, Broadcom had not yet acquired Avago and was still a fairly small
company. Yet, with only around 10,000 total Box users at the time, Broadcom realized significant
savings in current and future IT costs over a five-year term.

Toh’s team also engages Box Consulting on special projects, like data archiving and data classification
by persona. Any new project that IT can dream up, Box Consulting can support. Which is why, Toh
says, “They’re very easy to work with. We give them requirements; they come up with ideas. We
work together, and they always deliver on time.”

A stronger security posture with automated classification

Toh, who himself has been at Broadcom for nearly three decades, remembers, “When we first started
using Box, there were only two main purposes:”

1. To let employees access the information they needed to perform their jobs on their device of
   choice from anywhere they wanted
2. To collaborate better as a team

But, he continues, “Things have evolved. Now you have GDPR, security, compliance, and more and
more content. Over the years, Box has evolved to ensure that its security is enhanced.”

Security has become a big focus for Broadcom in the last few years, and with Box Governance and
the enhanced security Box offers, Toh doesn’t have to worry about the company’s unstructured data:
“I know my data will be safe, it will be secure, and it will be preserved — until it’s time to get rid of it,
of course.”

He’s referring to retention and disposition, which are closely tied to content classification. Through
Box Consulting, Toh’s team created an automated workflow that automatically classifies files based
on the creator’s role in the company and the department they work for. Employees don’t have to
manually handle disposition of content. In fact, they don’t even realize when files they created have
been automatically classified.

Secure external sharing via granular, role-based access

By using Box to share files, Broadcom’s IT department is also able to classify certain things and
restrict files from being edited, downloaded, or printed. It’s even possible to set access so someone
can upload content, but not download it. “With all the governance around Box,” Toh confirms, “I can
tweak the role-based access of each person, which is great for external sharing of even the most
sensitive information.”

External collaboration with customers and partners is a big part of work at Broadcom. This is true
even from the moment the company begins to consider acquiring a new entity and begins to conduct
due diligence, which involves the sharing back and forth of a lot of sensitive data.

“Because we do so much external sharing,” Toh explains, “and information can be sensitive,
classification and access restriction is very important.”

Improving workflows with Box Relay and Box Sign

Toh’s team is currently working with HR to create an end–to-end onboarding process using Box
Relay. The vision looks something like this:

• A potential new employee gets an offer, which triggers a workflow
• Box Sign is used to collect signatures from various stakeholders
• Documents are shared and stored to the right people and in the right folders
• Folders and related content follow the employee through the lifecycle of their time at Broadcom

Box for Workflow is the platform for these HR workflows, with Box Sign as the tool to automate
secure signature-gathering. Toh confirms, “With the latest addition of BoxSign into Box Platform, we
are now able to utilize it to integrate seamlessly into our agreements, contracts, and compliance.
BoxRelay does the triggering, and the agreement is automatically classified and stored in the proper
folder.”

Keeping teams comfortable in their preferred tools

Through various integrations with Box, as well as its core capability of being platform agnostic,
Broadcom can enable teams to work in comfortable ways without sacrificing content security:

• Employees can choose to use Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android to work with any kind of
  content they need to do their jobs
• In terms of content management, Broadcom is “a Google shop,” and Box for Google supports
  that capability
• But those who choose to use Microsoft 365 can also use Box for Microsoft
  “Box is unbiased,” Toh says, “and it works well with both platforms. In fact, one of my favorite
  features of Box is that it’s platform agnostic. We can use it in a lot of different ways.”

Another key business integration they take advantage of is the ability to use their Oracle ERP system
with Box. All purchase orders, invoices, and bills live on Box, but can be accessed and used via Oracle
ERP.

Finding information easily within billions of files

AI is the final piece to Broadcom’s content strategy. Toh puts it this way: “One of the features we are
most excited about and have been waiting for is Box AI.” For instance, he says, “With 1.5 billion files,
searches can get lost. Employees shouldn’t need to have to look at every single file to find the
information they’re looking for.”

There are a lot of areas of content use where Box AI will enable faster search and the ability to
surface important information quickly. For instance, contracts can be hundreds of pages long, and
looking through them for specific tidbits of information can take ages if done manually. With Box AI,
people at Broadcom can now ask questions about a contract — or multiple contracts at once — and
Box AI will surface granular and highly specific information like liability variations or changes in
clauses.

Broadcom can also take advantage of innovations in contract and document management. Toh says,
“With Box AI, employees will be more efficient in finding the information they’re looking for. This will
make the team more efficient, time-saving, and, at times, more accurate.”

An evolving technology partnership

What started as a technology relationship to ensure a centralized content repository for frequent
M&A activity has evolved into a much more sophisticated partnership between Box and Broadcom,
with an experimental mindset at the crux of it. Toh says, “What I love about Broadcom is that it’s a
very dynamic enterprise that’s always evolving. It’s great to have Box as a partner as we continue on
this journey.”

The top three things Broadcom loves about Box, according to Toh:

1. Scalability: “With every acquisition comes a lot of data, and we have to be able to scale very
   quickly to absorb all that information.”
2. Security: “With Box security, I don’t have to worry about important business documents and
   intellectual property being lost. We feel very secure and safe.”
3. Ease of use: “You want employees to be able to work and collaborate seamlessly, and Box
   provides that platform.”

 

With Box Sign part of the Box platform, we can seamlessly integrate it with Box Relay to efficiently sign contracts and agreements. Having everything in Box keeps them compliant and provides us with cost savings.

— Stanley Toh, Head of Enterprise End User Services and Experience, Broadcom