Dropbox, the cloud-storage company, has made a new assault on the business market with products for companies looking to shed old expensive IT equipment and bring the ease of consumer technology to the office.
Dennis Woodside, chief operating officer of Dropbox, said the company, which is adding ten million new users a month, is infiltrating the office as workers use personal accounts for work purposes. That has led more companies to adopt the cloud storage company for their own needs and the business, alongside the Slack messaging service, is one a new generation of enterprise software businesses encroaching on Microsoft’s traditional heartland.
The company has launched Project Infinite, which enables a business to move all of its data to Dropbox’s servers and give employees access from their desktops. “Most companies have more than a terabyte of information yet most hard drives can’t handle that,” Mr Woodside said.
Dropbox, which has been linked with a possible Apple sale again this year after turning down a nine-figure offer in 2009, already counts Expedia and News Corporation, the publisher of The Times, among its customers.
Nasdaq uses Dropbox to distribute investor materials for listings — although not SEC filings — and Mr Woodside said his company had earned the trust of customers who might have been concerned about security, given Dropbox’s consumer roots. The company, which set up in Europe three years ago, has 500 million users and 8 million in the workplace. Some 40 per cent of its customers are in Europe.
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Mr Woodside, 47, is the former head of Google in the UK and ran Motorola when it was owned by Google. He still carries a Motorola handset, and praises the latest model released since Lenovo, the Chinese technology company, took over the business.
His job at Dropbox pits him against his old employers at Google as well as Apple and Microsoft, with the cloud services sector one of the most keenly contested in technology. He said Dropbox was levering out technology that was often 10 to 20 years old, and was saving companies the cost of file-sharing servers and virtual networks. “[That] is all surprisingly expensive,” he said.