BitTitan sees their tool to migrate DropBox accounts to Microsoft One Drive for Business or Google Drive as particularly appealing to customers looking to consolidate all their data.
Jethro Seghers, BitTitan MigrationWiz’s Program Manager
Kirkland WA-based BitTitan has announced the extension of its MigrationWiz automated data migration solution to cover DropBox, and make it easy for organizations to move accounts from the popular but insecure DropBox to the enterprise-friendly alternatives of OneDrive for Business, which is part of Office 365, and Google Drive, which is part of Google Apps.
MigrationWiz originally was designed for SMBs, but has developed into an offering that also sells into the enterprise.
“It started as an SMB product, but we outgrew that market,” said Jethro Seghers, BitTitan MigrationWiz’s Program Manager. “Because of the functionality and flexibility, a lot of enterprises were interested as well. We used a SaaS model, but many enterprises wanted an on-prem version, with local deployment, so we made that an option, and have just invested in enterprise archiving for on-prem.”
The addition of DropBox to Migration Wiz is a SaaS offering, which Seghers said is aimed at both smaller and larger businesses. Seghers acknowledged that many SMBs have tolerated DropBox because almost no users pay for upgrades, so it is free. Even so, the security risk of DropBox’s consumer offering, which is what is being used in ‘shadow IT’ scenarios, is a concern for some.
That concern, that the app is both insecure and not properly monitored by IT, is a major use case that Seghers said BitTitan sees. There are others as well.
“It’s confusing for smaller businesses to have documents in DropBox, and in One Drive for Business,” he said. “They don’t know what’s where, and can find it hard to find things. You also have companies who are migrating mail into Office 365 and want to consolidate everything there. There are all these different scenarios for wanting to consolidate.”
MigrationWiz migrates all of mailboxes, public folders, documents, archives and PST files across platforms while keeping data structure, hierarchies and permissions intact, and without storing the transferred data during the migration process.
“The two main competitive advantages we have here is that the customer doesn’t need to do anything on-prem, and that we cover everything,” Seghers said. “We see a lot of migration tools that just do email OR documents OR SharePoint. We do everything.”
Seghers noted that while Microsoft has a tool for DropBox, it is fundamentally different from what MigrationWiz does.
“Microsoft has an integration package, but for Office, not Office 365, and it is a connector which lets you bring documents in from DropBox,” he said. “Their attitude is basically ‘we know everyone has a DropBox account and we are going to make it easier for you to take the DropBox information and put it into the corporate IT environment.’” Thus, while the Microsoft tool makes it easier to work WITH DropBox, MigrationWiz is all about migrating FROM DropBox. Their functions are fundamentally different, which Seghers said is a good thing, because BitTitan wants to work with Microsoft, not compete with them.
DropBox has also moved to remedy the security issues of its consumer product with DropBox for Business, but Seghers said that while that may encourage some organizations with many DropBox accounts to choose that option, he doesn’t think it will impact most of the market.
“In some cases, there will be customers who take the DropBox business version, but it doesn’t satisfy other use cases, which account for most of situations out there,” he said. “The vast majority are concerned about consolidation, or Shadow IT, and getting all their data in one environment.”
Seghers cited Geeman Yip, CEO and founder of BitTitan, in saying that their intent is to ‘liquify the market’ with their migration process. “That means we want to make migration easy, to remove the hassles,” he said. “With this tool, we want to make it easy for the end user with information on Dropbox to get it to their destination of choice. It’s very easy to use. It’s very easy to sell. The partner just needs to educate customers on what the product can do.”
BitTitan has a hybrid channel model, but over 90 per cent of their business goes through partners, who number over 4000 partners worldwide in over 110 countries.
