Dropbox Lays Out An Updated Enterprise Playbook.
SAN FRANCISCO — Tech can be a fickle business with a short memory. 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.”Our task is to get them to take the benefits they have seen from using a consumer grade tool and put it into a grown up enterprise environment with auditability and traceability.” Dropbox Australia’s headcount has risen from five to 50 in less than a year, and this has led to the company taking new office space in Sydney’s Martin Place.
The newly created Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which launched on Monday, is to become a premium reseller of Dropbox for Business as a potential deployment option for companies. Mr Wood said Ben & Jerry’s were using Dropbox as part of a move to plan Australian store and franchise expansions, while Mirvac was using Dropbox to share files of various types from its developments around the country. The company, best known for its drop-dead simple file-syncing service, has faced increasing skepticism over its “decacorn” status after eight years as a private company. New features include the ability to suspend an employee’s account after they leave a company so that it can be accessed if needed before being ultimately deleted. But as that shift has accelerated, competitors have proliferated, most of whom focused their energy on the more lucrative business-to-business market while Dropbox became known as primarily a consumer brand.
Admins can now sign in as individual users, should it be required for business continuity, but the user is provided with a complete audit trail of actions taken in their account. Dropbox was previously tipped to be a leading candidate for a major IPO this year, but talk has subsided in recent times as potential investors became more nervous about backing a company that hadn’t convinced the market it could monetise its sizeable user base. Today in San Francisco, Dropbox held its first-ever “customer event” in an effort to shore up its image as a serious business taken seriously by businesses. When Dropbox made its splash in online data storage for consumers several years ago, it had the market to itself and was the envy of Apple and Google, each of whom made offers to buy it. The company is also launching the Dropbox Partner Network, which is designed to offer a centralised repository for technology and channel partners to work together to deliver the latest solutions and communicate with customers.
From the moment Houston took the stage, it was clear he was there to assert that Dropbox is indeed an enterprise company. “It’s kind of funny 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. It was focused on new enterprise tools — which, as the company increasingly has to shift its business model from simply charging for storage, are going to be tools that will help it build a bigger business.
Also new is Dropbox Platform 2.0, an upgraded version of its API designed to make it even easier for developers to create products that integrate and live on top of Dropbox. At the same time, Google, Microsoft and Box offer more popular apps in the enterprise market, where Dropbox has designs to expand its business and its revenue base. “I’m a little bit concerned about all the (storage) players,” says Michael Facemire, an analyst at Forrester Research. “It is not a commodity yet, but how does one differentiate from others offering unlimited storage for free? “In a world of unicorns, we’re trying to build a business…with happy customers,” says Houston, who built a business out of his frustrations over not being able to remotely access files as an MIT student. “In the beginning we built storage. Houston said the company had hit 150,000 paying customers, 50,000 of which it added in the past 10 months, and unveiled a suite of new tools to make that justification as well. “Because we’ve been heads down for most of the year, and we don’t talk about ourselves that much, there’s been these misconceptions, oh we’re just for consumers, we’re playing catchup, we’re not serious about business,” Houston told me. “I think we’re like, hey, we don’t want to dwell on this, but just so you know this is the scoreboard, and the rate of growth and adoption is really big right now.” And the biggest tool the company unveiled was an enterprise tool set called Dropbox Enterprise, which includes some additional tools above its Dropbox business product. Finally, the company announced that it now reaches HIPAA and HITECH Act compliance obligations to ensure that private health data is kept out of the wrong hands.
But as it evolves, our product becomes a platform for collaboration, for the sharing of data among people, teams and industries.” Houston’s vision is ambitious. It’s essentially giving IT managers more tools to onboard employees to a corporate Dropbox account and have visibility into their collaboration processes, and also gives those managers a dedicated customer service representative.
CEO Drew Houston told his keynote audience: “What started as a simple way to access files from anywhere has evolved into a global collaboration platform. I think that really speaks to the power of our model.” “Dropbox has tried to play catch up to our enterprise product strategy for years, but serving millions of free consumer users is profoundly different from powering the world’s largest enterprises,” CEO Aaron Levie said in a statement. “Since 2007, Box has been focused on building the next generation content platform for businesses.” The trash talk included each side name-checking their biggest customers. Not only does he want Dropbox to be the online home of people’s photos and documents, he wants to build the world’s largest collaboration platform that connects every person and every company, regardless of the software or service they’re using.
There were other elements that came from today’s event: It’s partnered with Symantec for loss prevention; Dropbox is adding shared folders and shared links to their development API. Today, Dropbox connects 400 million people and eight million business across the world through 2.8 billion sharing connections. “In just a few short years, over 150,000 companies have chosen Dropbox Business to tap into this powerful collaboration platform. That means going after a growing and increasingly complex problem: the pain people face when they want to collaborate across different technologies, be it Google Docs or Microsoft Office.
And this morning, we made several announcements that underscore how we’ll continue creating richer connections. “We’re doing all of this in the service of our mission to simplify the way people work together. Still, Dropbox despite these goals and a splashy user conference at a historic venue (Bill Graham Civic Auditorium) with tech luminaries (Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Apple software head Eddy Cue), Dropbox faces steep odds — and sharp-elbowed rivals. We’re really excited about the future of Dropbox, and we look forward to building it with all of you.” Despite all this, Dropbox has been heavily criticised for its attitude to privacy. The company has Condeleezza Rice on its board of directors, regarded as one of the architects of the NSA PRISM snooping programme, leading whistleblower Edward Snowden to describe it as “hostile to privacy”.
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and others have been tripped up to varying degrees by competition, economic conditions, upper-management upheaval and bad luck. “If you look at this market, with a multitude of vendors, the challenge that any company has is: How do you not let your solution get commoditized? How does your product price not become diluted?” says Ajay Arora, CEO of security company Vera, which announced a business partnership with Dropbox on Wednesday. And that higher touch is really helpful that’s something they get from other vendors.” So, one last question that critics of the company frequently ask: Is Dropbox worth $10 billion? Houston wouldn’t comment on the valuation, but he certainly had an argument for why his company was so valuable. “What are the recipes for building a great company. We’re super early in this huge market,” Houston said. “We combine the consumer Internet piece with all the great things about SaaS business, the monetization, subscription revenue, sticky customers, I just can’t think of examples of too many companies that have a model like that.”
Many of the organization’s journalists, for example, depend on Dropbox to store and distribute video, says Dominic Shine, global chief information officer at News Corp. “People vote with their feet,” Houston says. Allowing people to use whatever tools they want, and not forcing them to use certain things… that are ridiculously complicated.” This summer, Dropbox snared Todd Jackson, who led Twitter’s content and discovery team, as its first vice president of product. Houston is a personable, whip-smart entrepreneur who did things his way — an uncompromisingly approach to user experience and software elegance that bordered on Wellsian (as in Orson) perfection.
It was Drew who told USA TODAY he is personally determined to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities going into technology and working at Dropbox. Times change quickly in Silicon Valley: Facebook, which was criticized for a lack of a mobile strategy two years ago, on Wednesday reported third-quarter revenue rose 41% to $4.5 billion on the strength of mobile advertising, pushing shares to an all-time high.