Dropbox, the San Francisco-based online storage and sync service today announced the business version of its service. The company, so far was focused on getting attention of individual users and small work groups. “We have been serving business users for a while,” co-founder and CEO Drew Houston said at an event.
Houston said that Dropbox now has million businesses and 97 percent of fortune 500 companies are using their offering, double from November 2012, when it had 100 million accounts. At present, the company has 200 million accounts. In addition, he pointed out that companies such as Kayak and National Geographic are its customers. Houston, claimed that a billion files are saved online.
“A year ago we started to work on new Dropbox for business,” said Houston. “A lot more has been remade under the hood at Dropbox.” In a blog post, Houston and
his co-founder Arash Ferdowsi wrote:
We thought about this from scratch and designed a solution we’re excited to share: connecting your personal Dropbox to your Dropbox for Business account. This’ll give you a personal Dropbox and a work Dropbox on all of your devices so you’ll never have to switch between them.
But this is about more than having two places for all your stuff. Take the mobile app — once you connect your Dropboxes, you’ll be able to get to both Dropbox folders from the same Files tab. Dropbox is also smart about making sure your stuff goes where it’s supposed to. For example, photos you add with Camera Upload will instantly show up in the Photos tab, but they’ll stay for your eyes only.
If the real service is as good as the demo (and I have no doubt that it wouldn’t be as good), Dropbox for Business will be something we are very likely to rollout at our company, considering we all use Dropbox in some capacity anyway.
Drop Box has certainly given a great advantage to its users. Its really very innovative that whatever we put in Drop Box, we can access that on our tabs and PC’s.
Today everyone carries Android phones where we always have some insecurity about our dta. But introducing Drop Box has made it Secure. So, makes ease for Business people as well.
“and I have no doubt that it wouldn’t be”?
I had to read that again too – he was trying to say the real service will be as good as the demo for sure, I have no doubt about it.
Yikes, I missed a word. Thanks for catching that. I have fixed the sentence. Sorry about that guys.
For small businesses the services may be fine. For medium and large businesses, there are more requirements like data separation, custom branding, data residency requirements and many others. In that case, a company is better off choosing self hosted solutions like Tonido FileCloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com).
Dropbox for Business is still a public cloud service. The reality is we live in information economy where information and intellectual property is a first order citizens for any business. So storing your organization data to a public cloud (whether it is dropbox or some other service) is equivalent to giving keys to your organization’s treasure trove. Also Dropbox being a high profile target, if the service hacked for some reason, it puts your data at risk in inadvertently. Tread with care.
How it is that day after day it seems that this Gigaom website is turning into nothing but paid always positive advertising for certain companies?
Box.com is still a much better product for business customers with much more mature sharing and access for content, security and device authorization.
But no matter this Gigaom site seems to choose the winners and losers before it writes its articles. If you want more questions on that look at the Masthead that highlights Apple’s walled garden products above all others (Apple used to be at least one item to the right on the masthead).
Clearly you don’t have anything to add about Dropbox’s news. Then you make an unrelated comment about Apple (and Apple ecosystem). Instead you make baseless allegations against us and what we do. Stop projecting your own biases and cast aspersions of our team and our company. Either be a productive member of the community and contribute with ideas or actual commentary or move along to some other place which meets your base needs.
Thanks
Both of you, Om and hundoman, need to get a grip. Assertions are not necessarily fact, and both of you have made assertions about the other that are not backed up. Thank you both for the intelligent conversation.
I’d like to see mre discussion about what venkat wrote.