Mobilizing the Enterprise

Dropbox won the Crunchies award for best overall startup last night. This is after raising $45M in venture funding with 45M active users, representing at least 20% of the ~250M iOS devices still in use today.  Dropbox also has a strategy to give away additional storage for every friend you invite to sign up for Dropbox.  This high level of use, referrals, and recommendation makes it impossible to remove Dropbox from devices and personal computers. At this point, instead of fighting it, enterprises must learn to work with it not against it.

The value proposition for Dropbox is making content easily accessible across devices (iPad, iPhone, Android, etc) and PCs.  We’ve spoken with many users who use Dropbox to save content discovered while browsing on their iPad and make it available for insertion into documents or email on their personal computers. Additionally, users create documents on their PC and review and fine tune them on their iPad, using Dropbox for easy cross device sharing. Simply put, Dropbox helps users get their work done.

Denying access to Dropbox makes your scattered document problem worse

When piloting Coaxion with corporate users, access to Dropbox became a frequently requested feature.  Users wanted to bring their work back into the enterprise, edit and iterate on the document with others, and upload their documents back onto their corporate servers, allowing them to delete the documents on Dropbox.  The scattered document problem became worse when corporations disallow access to Dropbox. Users already had documents on Dropbox for updating across devices but now they were forced to email the documents to their work accounts, creating multiple copies in personal email accounts as well as new documents in their work accounts. As these documents changed, the emailing would happen again and again, causing documents to be saved across personal and work email accounts - adding to the security exposure, corporate email storage costs, and making the scattered document problem worse.

With Coaxion, users easily access their Dropbox documents, share it with others for collaboration, and bring the final version back into their corporate storage system. Documents no longer build up in personal or work email and can be quickly deleted from Dropbox.