Dropbox rivals not threatened by Microsoft alliance

Dropbox and Microsoft announce partnership, but file-sharing competitors label the tie-up 'a defensive move'

Dropbox's file-sharing competitors have revealed they are not threatened by the announcement last week that Dropbox is partnering with Microsoft.

The partnership will integrate Microsoft Office with the cloud storage platform and allow users to save into Dropbox, directly from Microsoft Office, and to edit Office documents straight from Dropbox. Gartner analyst Jeff Mann told the Guardian one of the key reasons why Dropbox partnered with Microsoft was to give them more enterprise credibility.

But Dropbox's rivals have hit out at the partnership and told how they are not worried about the new apparent expansion from Dropbox into the B2B market.

Stuart Cochran, chief technology officer at Huddle, a software collaboration firm which allows businesses to share documents, said he felt the partnership was a "defensive move" by Dropbox.

"I think the partnership is great from an end-user point of view because it will mean it's more convenient and easy to use. But from Dropbox this is very much a defensive move as all this does is protect the consumers that it already has, and are probably already using Microsoft Office," he said.

"I think Dropbox saw a threat if their end users started to see Office 365, the cloud version of Office, being rolled out by their employers; they would maybe find it difficult to still use Dropbox. What I don't think this does is help Dropbox in offering a true enterprise solution."

Inflexion point
Cochran commented that he didn't think enterprises would be attracted to Dropbox for two reasons.

"Firstly, enterprises need a solution for their team, not just for their individual employees – that means they need to make sure when someone leaves the business the team still have access to all that person's data; one of the problems with Dropbox right now is that doesn't happen. Dropbox is really designed for individuals, not for teams," he explained.

"The second thing is, we see the enterprise file sync and share market to be at an inflexion point because as cloud services become more adopted, we don't believe file sync and share is going to be enough for enterprises anymore."

Ian McEwan, president and general manager for EMEA at enterprise file-sharing specialist Egnyte, said he felt confident the Microsoft partnership will not let Dropbox get the edge in the enterprise market.

"Trying to get yourself rebranded as an enterprise solution when 90 per cent of your customers are consumers is always going to be a challenge. It's all going to be down to the execution but we are not overly worried about it," he said.

McEwan also added that he felt the move could be beneficial for Egnyte and the industry as a whole.

"The more noise the competition makes in this space, the better it is for all of us... whether that be Box or Huddle, the more focus we can get into this space, the better awareness we can get for customers."

Dropbox has 70 million users worldwide and is headquartered in San Francisco. This summer Edward Snowden attacked Dropbox as he claimed it is "hostile to privacy", as it encrypts data only during transfer and not when it is being stored on servers.