Dropbox CEO Touts 150,000 Business Customers, Goes After Box.
Dropbox wants the outside world to know it now has more than 150,000 paying customers for its Dropbox for Business service, including the likes of men’s clothing retailer Bonobos, social network Pinterest and travel website Expedia. Dropbox, the online storage business that has been valued at up to $10bn, has sought to brush off suggestions that it is failing to live up to investors’ lofty expectations, saying that 150,000 businesses have signed up for its corporate services.Cloud storage company Dropbox today announced the launch of Dropbox Enterprise, a tier of service that builds on Dropbox Business and is obviously geared toward the biggest businesses.
Dropbox Inc. said it has 150,000 total business customers, in a bid to promote its position in an area where rivals are cutting into the cloud-storage provider’s lead. That amounts to 50,000 new accounts added in the past 10 months, the cloud file-sharing company’s founder and CEO Drew Houston said at the Dropbox Open event on Wednesday. Companies that buy it will get access to all of the features in Dropbox’s business-facing offering, plus special capabilities like the ability to prevent people with certain email address domains from using them with a Dropbox personal account. 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.
Drew Houston, Dropbox’s chief executive, took a potshot at its US rival Box, saying it had signed up as many paying businesses in the last 10 months as Box has in total. Houston took this as an opportunity to compare itself to an unnamed “competitor” — most likely that would be publicly traded Box. “We’ve added more paying business customers than they have in their lifetime, think about that,” Houston said. Houston used that soapbox to counter criticism that his company, a one-time Silicon Valley darling last valued at more than $10 billion by private investors, is widely used by consumers, few of which actually pay for its services. When companies set up the service’s account capture feature, any employees with personal Dropbox accounts that are set up to use a company email address will have their syncing halted until they choose to either bring those accounts under the company umbrella or change the identity they use for the accounts to a personal email.
Increasingly, Dropbox is recasting itself in the role of a collaboration software company, one that can help businesses share information more efficiently—and generate meaningful revenue along the way. While administrators will get to see how many users have opted to keep their accounts personal, they won’t know which specific users opted out of joining the Dropbox Enterprise umbrella.
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. 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.
Houston is bolstering efforts to woo more users amid growing competition in a crowded market that’s projected to reach almost $2 billion this year, according to IDC. Dropbox Enterprise is a new tier of its business offering, which includes security, admin, and collaboration features fond in Dropbox Business with the addition of new deployment tools, advanced controls, and services and support for large organizations. 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. Box, a rival that floated at the start of the year, has seen shares almost halve since then, and private investors have reportedly written down the value of their stakes in Dropbox this year. Using those tools, administrators can evaluate whether people are working together the way they want them to, and also track sharing outside their organization to make sure nothing problematic is going on.
It’s similar to Microsoft’s Delve Organizational Analytics service for Office 365 users, which the tech giant has yet to make generally available to users of its collaboration suite. Going forward the company will offer more training and support to partners, and it will invest in co-marketing and promoting partner applications in an app showcase, Woodside said. 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.
Mr Houston, who famously turned down an offer from Steve Jobs in 2009, is relying on growing its corporate business to improve sales, which were reported to be just $400m last year. Rather than focusing on developers (as it did in 2013 with the high-profile DBX conference), today Dropbox is all about customers — current and future alike. The company also announced a new “Dropbox Enterprise” service, which added a number of new IT management features, such as collaboration logs, for larger customers. “This is an incredibly powerful business model,” Mr Houston said. “We’re building a platform for collaboration that connects every person, company and ecosystem in the world. One of more obvious differences between the two companies is how quickly each has pivoted to keep ahead of the commoditization of cloud file-sharing services.
That’s a powerful tool for locking ex-employees (or soon to be ex-employees) away from sensitive customer data while still allowing access to it further on. Customers have unlimited access to the Dropbox API to seamlessly integrate Dropbox with existing IT systems, plus access to our platform team for support on custom integrations. It will be interesting to see if the new offering drives additional interest in Dropbox’s offering from the large businesses that it’s targeted to. We’re also providing customers with an assigned customer manager and world-class services for help with deployment, data migration, and user training.
Box co-founder CEO and Aaron Levie took to Twitter to make this observation about that product news: “Any time you ever want to see what Dropbox will do next, look for what we did 3-5 years ago.” This week, it disclosed a partnership with Mexicos’s giant Telmex, which will lead a major foray into Latin America, and an expanded relationship with Vodafone VOD 0.42% that covers dozens of new countries, including Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.