GigaOM » cloud solutions

Dropbox offers pro users twice the space as competition heats up

Eliza Kern — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:00:31 +0000

This story was corrected at 11:10 a.m. with the correct pricing for Box.net’s services.

Dropbox pro subscribers can now get excited about twice as much storage space on their accounts for no additional cost, as the company plans to announce Tuesday that it will double the storage space it offers to paid subscribers.

The decision comes as other companies are offering more competitively priced cloud storage options and as consumers themselves change how they use that space, uploading more material to the cloud and demanding more from their provider.

Subscribers who previously paid for the 50 GB Dropbox product will be upgraded to 102 GB of space. (Previously, subscribers received the 2 GB of free space provided to all users, plus an additional 48 GB.) The 100 GB subscribers will be upgraded to 202 GB of storage.

Dropbox will begin making the switch around 6 p.m. on Tuesday and should be finished by the following morning. Customers will receive an email when their accounts have been upgraded. New pro subscribers will be offered those same rates and storage sizes as well if they go to sign up on the website.

Anna-Christina Douglas, product marketing manager at Dropbox, said that the company decided to offer customers more storage space for the same price partially because they had received so many requests to offer more storage, but also because customers are using their subscriptions differently and uploading more of their daily content to the cloud.

Within the consumer data storage space, Dropbox faces competition from services like Google Drive, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and the slightly more enterprise-focused Box, among other options.

The new Dropbox pro account offering 102 GB (formerly the 50 pro subscription) will cost about $100 per year. By comparison, Google Drive offers 100 extra GB at about $60 for the year, Microsoft’s SkyDrive prices the same space per year at $50, and Amazon offers 100 GB for $100 a year. The most expensive end of Box.net’s consumer option offers 50 GB of space for $240 per year.

Douglas said that originally the pro subscription offerings were generally meant for small businesses and the free offerings for consumers, but as consumers are increasingly taking high-resolution photos and videos with smartphone cameras and other equipment, the lines between those groups has blurred, and demand for space has grown.

Dropbox now encourages users to sync their smartphone or point-and-shoot photos to their Dropbox accounts, offering users with free accounts additional storage space if they do so. This makes sense on Dropbox’s part, since consumers are probably unlikely to switch cloud providers once they have personal photos stored with that provider.

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Box’s Aaron Levie: The recession has helped enterprise cloud adoption

Eliza Kern — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:14:25 +0000

While the use of cloud technology to manage big data on the enterprise level now seems hugely popular, this technology benefitted greatly from the recession-era changes in thinking toward the cloud as a whole, said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, at GigaOM’s Structure conference.

“It’s sort of the perfect storm for any kind of enterprise software vendor in the cloud.”

Levie noted that before the recession, many businesses were hesitant to adopt cloud technology because of either security or scaling concerns. But as the technology adapted and became more user-friendly — and also became less expensive — businesses became more open to the idea of adopting cloud technology on a larger scale.

“The world around us has changed so dramatically… that when businesses go to set up their technology, the cloud is not the thing they put off in the corner of their organization. They make it central to their strategy.”

Levie predicted that enterprise adoption of cloud technology, combined with the growth of startups focused on business solutions, will lead to massive growth in the space. ”You’re going to get this exponential speed of adoption,” he said.

Levie noted that building companies from the start that are focused on providing dynamic software solutions, with frequently updated products, are inherently better suited to beat the competition.

“Fundamentally, these companies cannot change their DNA and their businesses fast enough to compete with these up and coming players.”

He pointed to his own company, Box, which updates its site on a constant basis, as opposed to other companies that do so quarterly or semi-annually: ”That’s what we think is so disruptive about the cloud,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2012 coverage, as well as the live stream, here.

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Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?

Paul Miller — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:00:01 +0000

“Cloud first” markets — those where companies’ first serious engagements with information technology are in the form of cloud computing — are beginning to emerge. For the BRIC economies in particular, this might mean a chance to adopt low-cost solutions that will give companies a clear competitive advantage over more established enterprises bogged down by legacy infrastructure. Many pieces are already in place, and so it is worth pondering where the real force behind our knowledge industries will wind up in the next few years.

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Established firms’ cloudy outlook: An opportunity for the developing world?

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:01:33 +0000

As we’ve discussed on WebWorkerDaily before, the cloud makes it possible for some of the smallest non-profits in the developing world to access bite-size, affordable slices of tech and talent. But perhaps, according to a recent blog post by A-list business writer Andrew McAffee, the developing world’s affinity for, and ability to benefit from, the cloud goes further than that.

According to the thought-provoking post, many developing countries are skipping straight over more traditional on-site tech and moving straight to embracing cloud solutions:

I read recently that Rajan Anandan, Google’s managing director for India, says that his country will be a ‘Cloud-first’ market for computing. The companies there, in other words, will go from having very little information technology (as is the case now) directly to embracing Cloud computing without ever going through the intermediary steps of mainframe-, mini-, client-server-, or PC-based computing.

Of course, Google employees all over the world are talking up the Cloud, but I think Anandan’s on to something. Just as many countries in the developing world have largely skipped over land-line telephony and moved straight from having virtually no phones at all to having tons of mobile phones, so too might something similar happen with corporate computing.

McAfee goes on to argue that many established America companies are unwilling to follow suit and rapidly embrace the cloud and that may be disastrous, drawing a parallel to a much earlier upheaval in tech:

A hundred years ago, American factories were in the process of converting from steam to electric power. It was a long, slow, uneven process. And it was led by startup companies and new buildings — the older ones just couldn’t justify the switch to themselves intellectually or financially — it wasn’t clear why electricity was so much better, but it was clear how much it would cost to convert an incumbent.

And how did the incumbents fare as the manufacturing industry transitioned from one power delivery mode to another? By 1935, over 40 percent of the big industrial trusts formed by 1905 had failed, and 10 percent more were limping along. Of the incumbents that survived, most became much smaller, with market shares declining by a third, on average, by the 1930s…. Will Cloud computing be similarly important? Will it contribute to large competitive shifts not only among IT vendors, but also among consumers of technology?

It’s a fascinating point to ponder and obviously an issue of great strategic priority if you’re one of the folks sitting atop an established firm deciding whether to get rid of most of your servers. But McAfee’s focus on how bad stodgy reluctance to change might be for big western firms opens up an equal opportunity to ponder how good the shift to the cloud might be for scrappy start-ups in the developing world, looking to generate not only profits but also general prosperity. Major shifts are, as McAfee, points out, not only a great danger for established firms, but also a great opportunity for the little guys who struggle to get started in a stable market.

Could the shift to the cloud be a major opportunity for entrepreneurs in the developing world?

Image courtesy of Flickr user mikecogh.

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Beyond the data center: transitioning government to the cloud

Paul Miller — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:00:26 +0000

This week UK Ministry of Justice official Martin Bellamy addressed concerns that the UK government has become less enthusiastic about a government cloud, saying, ”We are expecting to be able to demonstrate that moving to a cloud model is going to allow us to save substantial amounts [...]

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