Dive Brief:
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dropbox Inc. announced Tuesday they are working together to help grow their respective businesses.
- Over the past three years, HPE has helped Dropbox build its own dedicated storage infrastructure and move away from Amazon Web Services.
- HPE also agreed to become a Dropbox sales partner, which will include promoting the service to its corporate customers.
Dive Insight:
In March, Dropbox announced a plan to move away from Amazon Web Services' cloud storage, focusing instead on its own internal cloud. HPE supplied the hardware and scalable cloud solution for "Magic Pocket," Dropbox's dedicated storage infrastructure, the two companies revealed Tuesday at HPE's Discover Conference. Now, the companies say they’ll continue to work together to help support each other’s growth.
Dropbox hopes working with HPE will both improve the company’s traction among corporate and paying customers.
In March, Dropbox announced it had about 8 million business users, though only about 150,000 of those are paying customers. Analysts have said Dropbox will likely need more paying businesses in order to maintain profitability.
HPE CEO Meg Whitman has been working to increase the companies' market share. Earlier this week at the Discover Conference, HPE met with "several hundred" Dell-EMC partners in hopes of recruiting them to sell the HPE product portfolio.
