Dive Brief:

• Dropbox is pushing further into the media and entertainment vertical, announcing new and expanded partnerships Tuesday. The company has started to work with Lonely Planet, Superdigital and Westchester Publishing, among others. Dropbox also boosted its existing partnerships with Marvel and Getty Images.

• Media and entertainment as a vertical has unique challenges because of the vast array of content types and file sizes. Adding to the complexity is the increasingly global nature of work, where team members work across vast geographic areas. Westchester Publishing, a pre-press editorial and production services provider, has about 400 employees working around the world and a vast network of freelancers, said Tyler Carey, chief revenue officer of Westchester Publishing Services, in an interview with CIO Dive. When a product is in the works, such as a book getting ready for publication, it has to pass through a lot of hands, creating an organizational challenge.

• Westchester began working with Dropbox in 2017, migrating to the service to streamline systems and create a single platform for accessing content, rather than having employees log into a wide network of different servers. Now, whether an employee is in Connecticut or India, they can use the same Dropbox environment, Carey said. It also allows the company to engage with external freelancers and grant easy access to the different projects.

Dive Insight:

Westchester also used Dropbox to create a client portal, which gives customers an understanding of what's happening with their books or products, a process that used to be done on spreadsheets, Carey said. Now clients can see a number of service milestones.

For Westchester, 80% of the company, including production groups, sales, marketing and the vast majority of content, has migrated to Dropbox, according to Carey. The remaining 20% of the organization has more sensitive material and is still migrating to the platform.

While Dropbox has been a fan favorite for SMBs, the company has worked to break further into the enterprise market by targeting vertical sectors with unique needs. Just after its public debut in March, Dropbox announced partnerships with companies in the construction industry, a sector notorious for adopting digital tools slowly.

Dropbox is becoming the tailored solution for unique and widely different industries. Construction, for example, has different demands than the media and entertainment sector. By customizing solutions, Dropbox can tap into a broad customer base and meet a variety of content hosting and management demands.  

More than simple storage, Dropbox provides a platform to create, edit, iterate and share content, George Baier, industry principal, media at Dropbox, told CIO Dive. In media and entertainment alone, users have created and saved more than a billion files in Dropbox in the past year.

Dropbox has proven alluring to some media companies because it doesn't have file size limits and allows for previews from more than 280 different file formats, according to Baier. For example, a broadcaster can preview a 20 GB file, identify it and distribute it to a partner or affiliate without downloading the file.

But that's not to say Dropbox is the sole solution on the market for media and entertainment companies. Box touts Spotify, Discovery Channel and Live Nation as customers, for example.

When it comes to technology offerings, to gain more customers, rolling out customized solutions is key. Whether it's Dropbox or Box or another competitor on the market, understanding the unique pain points of a specific vertical will boost adoption and help grow a reputation in the industry.