Online storage company Dropbox has announced a business version of its popular service, a clear indication that it now sees growth beyond its traditional audience. So far, individual users and very small companies have fuelled its meteoric rise, allowing to double the number of accounts in 12 months to a whopping 200 million.
Dropbox already counts Kayak and National Geographic amongst its existing business consumer and its co-founder and CEO Drew Houston said that 97% of Fortune 500 companies use it. During the same event, Houston revealed that a billion files are now saved online, which translates into an average of only five files per account.
Dropbox currently offers three tiers with Dropbox for Business costing $795 per year for five users (about £500, AU$851) for unlimited storage, unlimited file recovery and version history.
A bigger box?
The new service will allow users to access their personal and their company's Dropbox account from one client, which Dropbox says, is as logical as "having your house keys and your work keycard on the same keychain".
Many may consider this as a no-brainer upgrade aimed to entice millions of free account holders to migrate to paid ones. The free online cloud storage market is evolving rapidly with Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive and Microsoft Skydrive likely to push smaller players like Mega or Dropbox to the fringes.
That announcement is also likely to be seen as a clear indication that Dropbox wants to get a bigger piece of the entreprise market where the likes of Box, Egnyte and Syncplicity are currently major players. Despite dropbox offering of only 2GB of storage for free, far less than the competition, it added a "gamification" aspect that allowed customers to gain more storage by enlisting friends.
- We take a look at the top 10 cloud services for SMBs
