BitTitan and DropBox will collaborate on an integrated go-to-market strategy where the services of each will be bundled together and available to both channels.
Rocco Seyboth, BitTitan’s VP, Product and Marketing
TORONTO – At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference here, BitTitan and DropBox have announced a collaboration – in which the companies will work together on an integrated go-to-market strategy designed to funnel business to each other.
“We already had a technology integration between Dropbox for Business and BitTitan, but we are significantly expanding that into a full partnership with a joint go-to-market strategy and joint field selling,” said Rocco Seyboth, BitTitan’s VP, Product and Marketing.
The idea behind the partnership is to make both companies – and their partners – more money by bundling their services together.
“What we are trying to do is make DropBox partners more successful at creating revenue around DropBox,” Seyboth said. “They can make money from reselling Dropbox and that’s great. But the opportunity is to wrap a one-time project service like migration with ongoing managed serviced to create a better experience. We believe these will be sold as a bundle.”
BitTitan sells both the one-time migration service – its initial offering – as well as the ongoing managed services, to bundle with Dropbox’s collaboration offering.
“It’s now far beyond data migration,” Seyboth said. “We help them sell Dropbox and Office 365 – and help them service them. Dropbox partners will have access to our sales automation tool. Dropbox and Microsoft have a great partnership because best of breed matters. One winning combo is Exchange Online and Dropbox. We give them a script how to sell that – and then they migrate that. A lot of customers move from Box to Dropbox or OneDrive to Dropbox. Once they close the deal, we give them the migration tools so they make money.”
Seyboth also said that the partnership is important for the BitTitan part of the partner ecosystem.
“It’s important for our 8000 partners, many of whom aren’t Dropbox partners yet,” he stated. “Office 365 partners can’t survive on Microsoft alone. We are going to create opportunities for service providers to make both one-time revenue and recurring revenue.” BitTitan has doubled their partner total in the last nine months.
The Dropbox channel is smaller, but still significant in size, and has also expanded greatly in the last year.
Hank Humphreys, Dropbox’s Channel Chief
“We started monetizing Dropbox about three and a half years ago, first with direct and then a channel sales force,” said Hank Humphreys, Dropbox’s Channel Chief. “A year ago, the channel was about 1200 people, and that was non-managed. We pivoted very hard around two-tier distribution, and now 14 months later we have 3400 partners.” They use Ingram Micro, and in North America they also use SYNNEX.”
Seyboth said that the choice of Dropbox as their partner was not a difficult one.
“We wanted someone born in the cloud, and also someone who was all in on their channel,” he said. “That immediately narrowed the field to one. “
Seyboth added other logical reasons to partner.
“We have a lot of the same partners. Our partners were also specifically asking for Dropbox in order to add file collaboration to Exchange Online.”
More opportunities will be added that both sets of partners can benefit from.
“On the roadmap later this year are tools attached to Dropbox that will allow partners to continue to remain relevant with customers.” Seyboth said. “We can provide an outsourced help desk and a tech platform that ties it all together, so the partner can deliver the same support to their customer as if Dropbox was doing it themselves. There will be others as well. We are going to curate service revenue opportunities with the best fit in other categories. You will see more industry leaders coming in and plugging in.” Nothing, however, is at the state where it can be announced now.
“The opportunity here is absolutely massive,” Humphrey said. “We have 500 million users with 70 per cent of those outside North America. We now have 200,000 paying customers. The opportunity is so massive because we have been monetizing at such a rapid rate. With a solution like BitTitan, it takes the friction out and gives the opportunity to the partners.”
