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$700 Million Box take-over turned down

Filed for an IPO According to the Wall street Journal

Box, a venture-capital-backed company whose software lets workers store and access documents on the Web, is raising a new round of financing that would value the start-up at $1.2 billion, people familiar with the matter said, showing investors' continued enchantment with such technologies.

The move comes as Palo Alto, California based Box turned down a takeover offer of at least $700 million from Citrix Systems  earlier this year, the people said. Box plans eventually to go public at a valuation of as much as $2 billion to $3 billion, and could file for an IPO next year, they added.  We understand that they filed for an IPO 6 months ago and the side stepped, as the market was not being receptive.

Founded in 2005, Box is among a group of young companies that are vying to shake up the way people work storing and retrieving documents on the web. They aim to unseat or fill in perceived shortcomings in business-software offerings around the Cloud.

Unlike traditional providers of business software, whose products are typically installed on desktops, these new companies deliver their products on-demand and over the Web—a trend known as cloud computing. Increasingly, businesses are adopting these cloud technologies because it reduces the need for storage and data-management hardware, thereby cutting costs.

Some of these business-software newcomers are reaping rich valuations in sales, private investments or IPOs. Yammer Inc., a social network for the workplace, recently sold itself to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Dropbox, a file-sharing company similar to Box, recently raised $250 million from venture-capital investors and boasts a $4 billion private valuation. Palo Alto Networks, a maker of network-security software for corporations, went public earlier this month and has a stock-market valuation of $3.9 billion.