Dropbox Announces 'Team' Service and Mobile Deal
The cloud-storage startup is offering a terabyte of storage for heavy users, and its software will appear on almost all HTC devices in 2012.
Silicon Valley darling Dropbox is launching several efforts to grow its business—a deceptively simple cloud storage service—beyond early adopters and techies. It’s doing so in the face of increasing competition from giants such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Dropbox’s position is both enviable and daunting. The company has seen its user base rocket from 25 million to 45 million since April, and it recently secured $250 million in funding from several venture capital funds, giving the company an estimated value of $4 billion.
At the same time, Dropbox is likely to face increasing competition from some even more popular, and well-funded, companies. Having declined Steve Jobs’s offer to acquire the company in late 2009, CEO Drew Houston admits to experiencing a sinking feeling when Apple announced its iCloud service, which remotely backs up images, music, documents, and other data and syncs that content between different Apple devices. That service closely resembles Dropbox’s.
Dropbox offers consumers two gigabytes of storage for free, 50 gigabytes for $9.99 a month, or 100 gigabytes for $19.99 a month. The new service, Dropbox for Teams, which has been in beta for the past year, is aimed at companies. It will provide a terabyte of storage for five users, along with administration tools and support, for $795 per year. Additional user licenses cost $125 per year and come with 200 gigabytes of additional storage. The company estimates (based on business e-mail addresses used) that over a million businesses already use Dropbox. “What was originally conceived of as a consumer thing turned out to be one of these things people brought to the workplace by the millions,” says Sujay Jaswa, Dropbox’s vice president of business development and sales. He says it was an obvious step to offer companies a version even more suited to their needs, including perks such as phone support.
In a crowded market for online storage, Dropbox has stood out for the simplicity and quality of its offering. Installing the software creates a normal-looking file on a computer; storing documents in that folder makes them available to any device running Dropbox’s software. Since it would be impractical to upload new copies of a document each time a change was made, Dropbox software takes snapshots (called “delta syncs”) of a file and only relays information about necessary changes back to the company’s cloud servers. “If you’re working on a design file, sending a delta from Italy to Argentina is way, way faster than sending a whole file,” says ChenLi Wang, who leads the effort to move into business services at Dropbox.
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