Dive Brief:
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Dropbox announced Wednesday that IBM is now an official partner, joining the ranks of the company's other premier partners including Dell, Microsoft and Salesforce.
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The companies plan to collaborate to make it easier for SAP or Oracle core business application users to employ Dropbox with those systems, according to Dropbox global sales and partnership strategy lead Thomas Hansen.
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Dropbox and IBM have worked together for the past two years, but the partnership agreement signals they plan to take the collaboration more seriously.
Dive Insight:
Hansen, who left Microsoft to join Dropbox last summer, has been forming partnerships with large tech companies in hopes of making its services more appealing to businesses.
But the IBM partnership is not exclusive. Dropbox’s management technology also works with several other IT management tools. And IBM works with Dropbox rival Box to offer end-to-end compliance for customer cloud content.
Organizations have demanded new and better ways for employees to collaborate in recent years, and tech companies—both new and old—are responding with updated products and features that allow for more workplace flexibility. In March, Dropbox announced it now has 500 million users globally. Eight million of those users are businesses, the company said.