Dropbox goes after big businesses as the cloud wars rage on
While the cloud storage provider has proven wildly popular among consumers, its products have had a slightly harder time gaining massive adoption in the enterprise.
Certainly one of extra apparent variations between the 2 corporations is how rapidly every has pivoted to maintain forward of the commoditization of cloud file-sharing companies.
Most notable is the arrival of Dropbox Enterprise, an entire ecosystem building on the existing Dropbox Business offer but aimed squarely at competing offerings such as Google For Work in becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft.
File hosting service Dropbox unveiled an updated enterprise playbook at a San Francisco conference on November 4. When Dropbox released its Carousel photo backup and browsing app, it was a fairly unique experience that integrated easy photo browsing and cloud backup of images. Dropbox says in its blog that customers will likewise be given the access to its platform for support related to custom integrations.
He also discussed the competition, without actually saying the company’s name.
The company reportedly claims 400 million users representing 8 million different organizations. In the last 10 months, 50,000 businesses just came in, which Houston boasted more than what its biggest competitors have signed up. “We’ve added more paying business customers than they have in their lifetime, think about that”, Houston said. “That speaks to the power of our model”, Houston said. Dropbox, however, has been offering the same service in the past but mostly for its regular customers. The new tools will also give IT managers more visibility into their collaboration processes; thereby giving them a dedicated customer service representative. It affords administrators the ability to easily migrate personal accounts to enterprise accounts, and provide the tools needed to monitor how Dropbox is being used by employees. Box, a competitor, has been working with third-party sellers since before it went public in January.
“About 90 per cent plus of the ASX 200 have a significant footprint of Dropbox across them of a few description, which is great for us as we try to build out our enterprise team”, Mr Wood said.
“It’s kind of amusing when people are like, Dropbox isn’t serious about businesses, or we’re only about consumers, when it’s really all the consumers that have brought us into all those businesses”, Houston said. While most of these are using its free or consumer version, 150,000 are paying for its more expensive “Dropbox for Business” service, a number that has grown by 50,000 in the last 10 months. Our lead has resulted in 52% of the Fortune 500 choosing Box, with customers like Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly, IBM, and General Electric deploying Box to tens and even hundreds of thousands of employees.
One advantage Dropbox enjoys over Box in the battle for PR primacy is privacy.