Dropbox Takes Aim At Box With Push Into Enterprise Market

With Box’s IPO on the horizon, Dropbox held an event in San Francisco Wednesday morning to unveil a revamped version of Dropbox for Business.

BuzzFeed/Matthew Lynley

After focusing on consumers for more than half a decade, Dropbox is finally getting serious about gathering big businesses as clients as it heads toward an initial public offering.

The company unveiled a revamped version of Dropbox for Business Wednesday at an event in San Francisco. It includes a number of new features like remote wiping and enhanced security, built to woo bigger enterprise clients who have relied on other companies like Box for their cloud storage and file-sharing services.

"There have been a couple speed bumps here," Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said. "It's so popular, and that's a problem — a lot of people are putting company stuff in their personal Dropboxes... We didn't have to rebuild Dropbox for business, we had to rebuild Dropbox itself."

Specific details about the update for Dropbox for Business at the event were somewhat scant, but the message was clear: Houston and Dropbox are gunning for big companies as clients to build out Dropbox's revenue stream. Dropbox already sells its cloud storage service as a subscription to regular consumers, who can buy additional storage for files that they can synchronize across multiple devices. But the company began rolling out services specifically geared toward big companies last year.

Matthew Lynley/BuzzFeed

Also on the horizon is an initial public offering by Box, a similar file-sharing and storage service to Dropbox that focuses more on enterprise clients. That company, while spending hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and sales expenses, lists many of the companies on the Fortune 500 as clients.

Dropbox — while now competing with Box — also competes with giants in the technology sector like Google, Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft last month rolled out its Office applications like Word and Excel for the iPad, iPhone and Android.

Dropbox has benefited from a lot of branding and recognition thanks to its consumer approach, especially in Silicon Valley where much of the community points to it as the next hot initial public offering following Twitter's IPO last year. Dropbox was valued at $10 billion in its last financing round, putting it well ahead of other Silicon Valley startups and competitor Box.

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