Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Dropbox is going corporate.
On Wednesday, the file-syncing startup launched an application programming interface, or API, that lets outside developers build software on top of its Dropbox for Business service. That may sound like a jumble of tech speak, but it could be very useful to businesses, and ultimately, it represents a kind of finale to a decades-long contest: consumer technology has now emerged triumphant over corporate IT as the way to get work done.
Whether it’s Gmail at work or Apple partnering with IBM to bring iPhones into the office, workers are more and more the ones bringing new software and hardware into the workplace, not sales teams. This hasn’t come without difficulty, as companies struggle to balance the best tool for the job with the tools they can control. But the momentum appears to be irresistible, and the path of Dropbox from consumer convenience to corporate necessity is typical.
“We’re seeing a pull into larger and larger deals and larger and larger customers,” Ilya Fushman, Dropbox for Business’ head of product, tells WIRED. “A lot of this is really addressing the needs of larger and larger organizations.”
Too Simple
Ilya Fushman, head of product, Dropbox for Business Dropbox
Dropbox began as a single folder developed by co-founder Drew Houston so he didn’t have to email files to himself to work on them between home and school. But if file-syncing was useful for a college student, its utility in the workplace is even more obvious. When Dropbox got up and running in 2007, you had a work computer and a home computer. Today, you have a work computer and a home computer and a a smartphone and a tablet. And work happens on all of them.
But if Dropbox’s simplicity made it too tempting to pass up as software for work, that same minimalism made it an IT headache. Employees wanted to use Dropbox, and they found ways, even if the IT department hadn’t authorized it. And those departments often weren’t likely to do so, because Dropbox was so simple they had no way to control it.
Dropbox itself recognized this problem, and the potentially huge amount of corporate business it could capture by finding a solution. Last year, the company launched Dropbox for Business, which created a new work folder next to a user’s personal folder that IT managers could monitor and regulate.
Even that, however, didn’t meet the needs of truly big companies, ones whose head counts match the populations of small cities and have the bureaucracies to match. For them, the basic auditing tools and controls offered by Dropbox weren’t enough to meet the demands of their complex IT regulations, Fushman says. They needed the ability to customize how Dropbox worked, he says, which is where the new API comes in.
Splunk dashboard for Dropbox. Dropbox
From the Outside In
By allowing other software to access Dropbox files and features through the API, the idea is that companies can put controls in place that go beyond what Dropbox alone offers. Dropbox says businesses will be able to monitor not just what files go in and out of employees’ Dropboxes, but what’s in those files, allowing them to keep closer tabs on issues of legality, confidentiality, and security.
Dozens of third-party software makers, from Dell and Cisco to HipChat and Trello, will have Dropbox-linked tools through the business API, the company says. Big-data analytics outfit Splunk, for example, will have a dashboard that lets IT see who is accessing corporate Dropbox files, what they’re doing with them, and from where.
As evidence that Dropbox is making its way deep into the corporate world, the company points to major customers like Hyatt, News Corp, and Under Armour. More than 100,000 companies in all now use Dropbox for Business, Fushman says.
Even so, Dropbox is hardly on its way to becoming the only way corporations share and sync files. Dropbox rival Box, for one, has focused on enterprise customers from the start, and it is now pushing hard to develop industry-specific products for fields ranging from healthcare to media. But that doesn’t detract from Dropbox’s remarkable trajectory. Today, Dropbox users have uploaded more than 35 billion documents made using Microsoft Office, the classic symbol of top-down IT. Dropbox is now also on the inside, but unlike its predecessors, it came from the outside in.
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