Box Taps Former Symantec Exec Enrique Salem as Advisor

Former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem has been named as a board advisor to cloud storage vendor Box, where he will use his experience in PC software security to help Box enhance its own security.

News of Salem’s role as an advisor came during the RSA Conference in San Franscisco, according to GigaOm, which reported Salem will work to make CEOs and CISOs “more comfortable using cloud services,” in addition to enhancing Box’s security measures to protect end user information.

Salem worked for Symantec for 19 years and held roles that include group president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing as well as president of Consumer Products, culminating in his appointment as CEO in January 2008, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Salem has been working in the IT channel for 25 years. Last year, Salem joined FireEye’s board of directors, giving him previous advisory experience to his already considerable career in IT security.

GigaOm reports that Salem is the second big gun that Box has added as an advisor—former Microsoft Windows chief Steven Sinofsky joined the company last August in an effort to improve Box’s product and platform strategies. Box is a direct competitor to the well-known Dropbox, in addition to other online cloud storage vendors Accellion and ownCloud.

While Dropbox is by far the most popular and oft-talked about cloud storage site, GigaOm suspects that Salem’s appointment to Box is the company’s way of trying to infiltrate the lucrative corporate storage world and to get ahead of its competitors by learning the ropes from a known industry pro. With several big names helping it to move up the ranks, it is likely Box will improve its standing among its competitors; however, it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to unseat Dropbox as the dominant figure in the cloud-based storage world, especially with recent news of Dropbox’s increased venture funding last month.