Box opening European HQ in London

Box will announce the opening of its European headquarters in London today, as the company seeks to boost sales of its cloud-hosted enterprise collaboration and content management software in the region.

Already, 40% of Box's 11 million users are located in Europe, where demand for the company's product has been growing very fast, said Box CEO Aaron Levie.

"This represents the start of our European expansion," he said, adding that the company expects to have about 100 employees in Europe by next year.

Box, whose enterprise collaboration and content management application is used by about 120,000 businesses worldwide, has also struck an alliance with HP for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, thus extending an existing partnership between the companies.

In the EMEA region, Box and HP will craft an "exclusive offer" based on the Box service for small and medium-size businesses.

Box, which is based in Los Altos, California, and plans to open offices in other European countries, will staff its London headquarters initially with salespeople and with technical support and implementation services employees.

At a product level, Box is localising its site and translating the user interface into the different languages spoken in Europe. In addition, Box plans to soon roll out IT infrastructure improvements to enhance the performance of its application outside of the US, Levie said.

Greg Strickland, Box's vice president of business operations for the past four years has been named international general manager in charge of the company's international business and expansion. Box, privately held and founded in 2005, has raised $162 million in venture capital.