Dropbox is not messing around. Two weeks ago it announced its IPO. Just last week it announced a big partnership with Google and today comes news that it is integrating more deeply with Salesforce.
Dropbox and Salesforce have danced a bit in the past as cloud companies tend to do, but today’s announcement is a bit broader. It involves having Dropbox folders embedded in Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud giving them a kind of light-weight digital asset management solution.
For example, a company’s creative agency could create photos and other assets for a marketing campaign and store them in Salesforce’s marketing cloud. The folder is fully integrated so that if the agency changes one of the assets, which isn’t unusual, and updates their Dropbox folder, the integrated folder in Salesforce updates automatically.
This kind of integration saves the Salesforce user steps. Instead of having to open Dropbox, navigate to the folder, find the updated asset and manually move it into Salesforce, it all happens in one place.
The companies also announced that there would be deeper integration with Quip, the word processing/collaboration tool Salesforce acquired in 2016 for $750 million. Here, much like the Google G Suite integration announced last week, the companies are trying to make it easier for end users to access their content wherever they want to work.
In this case, there will be two-way integration. They will provide the ability to embed Dropbox folders inside Quip, just as you will be able to do in Marketing and Commerce Clouds, but you will also be able to access and work with Quip documents inside of Dropbox. Again, this is about letting users decide the tools they want to use and where they prefer to access them.
While these kinds of partnership may seem counter-intuitive, Quentin Clark, SVP of Engineering, Product and Design at Dropbox told TechCrunch last week during the G Suite integration announcement, it’s about giving the people what they want.
“It is enabling best of breed and recognizing that you are going to hire your product to do a certain job and may be hiring other products to do other jobs, and you have to be at peace with that,” he said.
The two companies plan to take it a step further with Salesforce using Dropbox and Dropbox using Salesforce internally for whatever that’s worth. We have seen similar announcements from Salesforce in the past regarding G Suite integration and Office 365 too — so take it as you will.
While Dropbox would no doubt say these announcements have absolutely nothing to do with the IPO, they probably have everything to do with it. It was clear in the S-1 filing that Dropbox garners the vast majority of its revenue from the consumer side of the business. It seems to be desperately trying to beef up its enterprise street cred ahead of the upcoming IPO. While these partnership announcements could help, the numbers suggest otherwise.
Much like the G Suite integration partnership announced last week, this an announcement and not a launch. That is expected to happen sometime in the second half of this year.
