Box CEO Aaron Levie might have said that there was no direct rivalry between his company and Dropbox, but as both companies hurtle towards an IPO, it’s difficult not to compare the two.

According to Cromwell Schubarth writing for Biz Journals: “Levie downplays talk of a rivalry between the companies, pointing to questions about which social network would survive in the early days of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Just as those online social networks have all thrived, he has said there is room for a number of online storage and sharing businesses.”

Yet, as many of the hyper vendors muscle into the market – Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft just to name a few – gauging the success of pure play cloud storage firms leads to some interesting conclusions.

Dropbox may have 200m users compared to Box’s 20m, yet the fires were well and truly stoked by Box’s announcement …