Remember Dropbox? While its upstart little brother Box has been giving the tech press plenty to write about with its soap opera-styled ‘will they, won’t they’ IPO saga and proclamations of the end of the storage wars, Dropbox has been going about its business a little more quietly.
And the company has today launched an update to its Dropbox Pro product, chief of which revolves around introducing a single plan of 1 terabyte of space at the same price of $9.99 a month.
The majority of the other changes to Dropbox’s paid individual product revolve around collaboration and security. You can now creating passwords for shared links, adding an extra layer of security; create expiry dates for shared links; and put together view-only permissions, so you can delegate as to who can read and who can edit files (below).
Picture credit: Dropbox
The updated Dropbox Pro also dabbles in content and device management by incorporating a remote wipe facility. Current Dropbox Pro users will see their software being upgraded automatically in the coming days.
A blog post announcing the move has generated mixed reviews, with positive comments being weighed out by users complaining at only one price option. Yet it’s a balancing act; there will be users ecstatic at essentially getting more storage for no extra charge, while others who don’t need 1 TB will be disappointed there aren’t lower tiered, lower cost options.
The news comes at an interesting time for Dropbox, with cloud storage vendors’ tiered business model of individual freemium and enterprise coming under scrutiny. Last month Box announced it was clearing out all storage limits for enterprise customers – you want to pay for the world, we’ll give it to you. Once the biggest vendors – Amazon, Google, Microsoft – were slashing its prices, it sounded the death knell for Box and Dropbox’s traditional models.
Last month Gartner released its Enterprise File Synchronisation and Sharing Magic Quadrant, with Dropbox finding a place in the ‘challengers’ section whilst Box placed among the leaders, behind Citrix and EMC. Yet according to this CMSWire article, for this enterprise-heavy field of business, pure cloud vendors might not be the best solution.
With Box’s BoxWorks event coming up at the start of this month, all eyes will be on CEO Aaron Levie. Investors and analysts certainly haven’t forgotten the company bailing out of its IPO in July, opting instead for more private cash.
Find out more about the latest Dropbox Pro here.