Dropbox, the embattled cloud storage company, introduced a new tier for its business product during its Dropbox Open conference today. The category is called Dropbox Enterprise — not to be confused with Dropbox Business — and it’s geared toward bigger companies that need more advanced tools.
Dropbox Announces Dropbox Enterprise and New Sales Partnerships
Today’s announcements were all about wooing more business customers.
Dropbox
For example, enterprise businesses will be able to add big batches of employees to their account all at once instead of slowly adding people one by one. Enterprise customers will also be assigned a manager on the Dropbox team who will help them use the product.
In addition to launching its Enterprise tier, Dropbox also revealed that it has hit 400 million regular users and 150,000 business customers, with 50,000 of those customers added in the last 10 months.
To continue growing its business customer base, the company has forged a host of new partnerships. Many businesses buy their IT software and hardware from third-party sellers, so Dropbox has teamed up with three of these suppliers — Synnex, Ingram Micro and HP Enterprise.
Working with brokers is a common enterprise sales tactic because it’s costly and challenging to peddle a product to businesses of different sizes and industries. It’s a natural evolution in Dropbox’s strategy as it seeks to grow Dropbox for Business. Box, a competitor, has been working with third-party sellers since 2013. It’s also working with Ingram Micro, as well as other brokers like CDW, Insight Direct, SoftChoice, SHI International Corp., AT&T, Telefonica and Telstra.
Dropbox’s Open conference comes as the company struggles to prove it is worth its $10 billion valuation. Some of its larger investors, BlackRock and Fidelity, have downgraded what they believe their shares are worth. Dropbox faces formidable competitors in the consumer cloud storage space, like Google and Amazon, and some of its efforts to branch out from its core service, like email management app Mailbox and picture app Carousel, have struggled to find an audience.
In light of these challenges, the company is doubling down on its enterprise product; today’s announcements were all about wooing more business customers.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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