Dropbox wants channel to generate half its sales

Enterprise file sharing vendor reveals plans to increase channel partners and current partner benefit schemes

Enterprise file sharing vendor Dropbox is aiming to increase the channel to over half of its overall sales within three years.

Historically, indirect sales have generated just ten per cent of the total, but head of global channel sales Hank Humphreys was hired 10 months ago from Google to accelerate the existing programme.

He said: "I have been working to develop a strategy for what is the right route to market for channel. Ultimately we want our business to be driven by channel.

"We would be quite happy if we could be 100 per cent driven by the channel; we realised that to get the scale and reach that we really want we need channel partners."

Founded in 2007, Dropbox claimed in November that 150,000 companies now use Dropbox Business. According to IDC, Dropbox led the file synchronisation and file sharing market in 2014, with 24 per cent marketshare, ahead of Box on 21 per cent.

Dropbox claims to be device and platform agnostic, playing across every operating system and device equally.

The business' traditional channel model has seen it sell direct to resellers, it now harbours plans to move to a two-tier set up.

Humphreys explained: "The notion of us doing distribution allows us to get much better reach and scale on a much faster time scale but distribution also adds a lot of value added services to our products that we aren't able to do ourselves, such as extended financing."

Dropbox currently has 2,000 partners globally, including 80-100 in the UK, Humphreys said.

"The majority of them are managed service providers and hosters working across primarily the SMB and lower mid-market space and we are looking to expand that across all partner types that service all segments of the market.

"Our customers have trusted relationships already in place with our channel partners," he added. "Instead of asking them to add another relationship to their portfolio that they have to manage with us directly, we would like to allow them to purchase through trusted relationships and purchasing mechanisms which are already in place. We just want to be easy to do business with and we realise our partners system is the way to accomplish that."

As well as increasing its partner programme, Dropbox is developing its current benefits plan, with the launch announced in November last year. The first category focuses on technology partners currently developing products on Dropbox technology.

The second category is to be launched in the coming weeks and is aimed at the reseller partners. This will include different tiers based on achievement and the benefits associated with them.

Humphreys said: "Since the relaunch of the programme we've seen some incredible momentum from partners of various sizes. We are getting great traction because of our ability to plug into what they are already selling. Ultimately we combine so well with so many other technologies that our partners love to put us into their ecosystem, because we add value to their end users.

"Our ultimate ambition is to have meaningful services and benefits for every type of partner who wants to work with or resell our product."