AARNet brings Box cloud collaboration platform to Research & Education sector

SYDNEY Australia, 2 April 2014 – AARNet (Australia’s Academic and Research Network) today announced that it will provide Box’s cloud content and collaboration management platform to Australian universities and other AARNet customers.

“Our customers have been asking for a secure, scalable and affordable service packed with features that helps students, faculty and staff share and manage content from anywhere, anytime, on any device and we’re pleased to now offer them Box as a solution,” said AARNet’s CEO Chris Hancock.

Box has been deployed widely across the higher education sector internationally and counts among its customers an impressive list of prestigious universities in the USA, including Stanford University, University of California – Berkley, Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University.

Trials of the Box for AARNet cloud service are now underway with Edith Cowan University, Charles Sturt University, Southern Cross University, University of South Australia, University of Adelaide, Queensland University of Technology, Holmesglen TAFE and Newington College.

“We’re interested in implementing AARNet’s Box offering because it’s an exciting opportunity to efficiently deliver a cloud-based collaborative data storage service to our staff and students that’s flexible enough to meet their wide-ranging needs,” said Paul Sherlock, CIO of the University of South Australia.

Box for AARNet features will be customised for Australia’s Research and Education sector and the trials are an important part of the fine-tuning process.

AARNet’s Director Product Solutions, Jamie Sunderland says the AARNet-Box agreement means that AARNet customers will be able to rapidly deploy Box services to their entire organisation and manage how content is distributed across multiple devices and shared between internal users and external collaborators.

Box for AARNet customised features include:

• access using federated single sign-on,
• integration with university provisioning and security requirements, and
• an Enterprise Customer Agreement customised for the Australian Research and Education sector.
• competitive pricing

Box for AARNet is being offered as part of the AARNet NET+ program to provide a choice of ‘above the network’ services customised to meet the needs of the AARNet community. AARNet Net+ program services leverage the high capacity, high preforming AARNet4 network, are competitively priced and easy for IT departments to manage.

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About AARNet

AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) is the not for profit company that operates Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet). The shareholders are 38 Australian universities and the CSIRO.

AARNet provides high capacity Internet and other communications services for the nation’s research and education community, including universities, health and other research organisations, schools, vocational training providers and cultural institutions. AARNet serves over one million end users who access the network for teaching, learning and research.

More information can be found at AARNet (www.aarnet.edu.au ) or connect with AARNet on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AARNet )

Media Contact:  Jane Gifford           media@aarnet.edu.au        +61 2  9779 6960