By Robert McMillan 

Big-tech incumbent IBM Corp. and Silicon Valley darling Box Inc. are teaming up to boost each other's sales opportunities in corporate settings.

IBM's Global Services group gets to weave the hip, fast-growing Box service into its cloud-computing offerings. In return, Box gets a new channel into large corporations and a way to reach customers in conservative industries such as health care, finance and retail.

The partnership, set to be announced Wednesday, will allow Box users to store files on IBM's SoftLayer cloud platform. IBM's mobile apps will deliver Box services on Apple Inc.'s iPhones and iPads along with IBM's security and content management tools, said Bob Picciano, senior vice president with IBM Analytics.

"We see this partnership as a kind of blueprint for where enterprise technology is going to go," said Box CEO Aaron Levie.

Building Box into SoftLayer will take as long as a year, but IBM could start building Box's services into custom software immediately, Box said.

Box's service for storing, sharing and collaborating on documents has attracted more than 37 million registered users, but relatively few pay for it. Over the past year, the company has built a series of services aimed at vertical markets such as health care, retail, and entertainment that. Marketed as Box For Industries, those features have helped the company grow its roster of paying customers to a June total of more than 3.7 million, up 70 percent from a year earlier. They also help differentiate Box from competition such as Drive from Google Inc. and OneDrive from Microsoft Corp.

The partnership also will help Box grow its customer base globally. Box's data centers are located in the U.S., Mr. Levie said, but IBM has more than 40 data centers in 17 countries, allowing Box to serve international businesses that are prohibited by law from exporting customer data.

"We plan to use IBM's cloud in at least a dozen or so key markets that we're going after internationally," Mr. Levie said.

IBM, faced with declining revenues in its hardware, software and services businesses, is looking to companies like Box to spur its reinvention as a cloud-services company. The transition puts it in competition with cloud-computing providers such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft, and Oracle Corp.

The stakes are especially high for IBM, said Frank Gens, chief analyst with industry research firm International Data Corp. "There's going to be a whole new set of apps that basically run every industry," he said. "So the battle now is going to be who is going to run that new set of apps."

Technologies like Box and the iPhone have sneaked into large companies because they were popular with consumers. But now businesses are thinking about them more strategically, said Mr. Gens. "Now the enterprise is saying, 'Hey this is not just about letting our employees play with this stuff. This is about creating competitive advantages.'"

Both companies have been aggressively forming strategic partnerships in recent months. Last week, Box and Microsoft announced a deal that would let customers edit Office Online files in Box. Last year, Cisco Systems Inc. said it would integrate its collaboration software, called Project Squared, with Box.

IBM has announced a string of agreements that ally the 104-year-old company with fast-growing Internet and mobile businesses including Apple, Twitter Inc., and Facebook Inc.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

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