The deeper integration with Dropbox includes a Go-to-Market component through which Dropbox will resell a BetterCloud SKU focused solely on Dropbox.
The BetterCloud Integration Center
SaaS operations management provider BetterCloud, whose platform provides multi-vendor management and security for SaaS applications, has made a pair of announcements at their Altitude 2019 user conference in San Francisco. They have deepened their partnership with Dropbox, with a key element being a new Go-to-Market element which will see Dropbox sell BetterCloud for Dropbox on the Dropbox price list. The other announcement is a new Integration Center which greatly expands the number of vendors BetterCloud supports – from 10 to 42. It also provides a mechanism to add 20-30 new integrations every quarter, and to allow partners and customers to post integrations of their own.
“The Dropbox integration has been an important one for us,” said Shreyas Sadalgi, BetterCloud’s Chief Business Strategy Officer. “With this announcement we are expanding it. This expansion is tied to Dropbox’s new vision around the Smart Workspace, which is their evolution to being more than a file sharing provider to bringing together the modern workspace.”
Sadalgi said that this integration has four core components.
“Because of this Smart Workspace vision, BetterCloud and Dropbox are now tightly aligned,” Sadalgi noted. “We both champion the same cause – best of breed SaaS application. BetterCloud complements that by centralizing and automating SaaS applications for IT admins.” This shared vision was unveiled at both the BetterCloud event and Dropbox’s own user conference, which by coincidence were both being held in San Francisco at the same time.
Secondly, as part of the expanded relationship, Dropbox is making a five million dollar strategic financial investment in BetterCloud.
“This is not a significant amount of money in terms of our overall funding, which is over $100 million, but it will be used to provide funding specifically for these strategic initiatives with Dropbox,” Sadalgi said. “A lot of the heavy lifting in building out the integration will be done by us, and this provides the funding for that, as well as the enablement of our Dropbox sales teams.”
The third component – a key one for BetterCloud – is that Dropbox will resell a customized BetterCloud for Dropbox solution as their preferred solution for enabling secure and faster adoption of Dropbox Business. This BetterCloud for Dropbox SKU will be generally available later this year.
“Dropbox realizes that we have had a good partnership, and that we have already been adopted by 150 Dropbox customers,” Sadalgi said. “Now, for the first time, they will sell us as an add-on on their price list, BetterCloud for Dropbox is a customized packaging of Dropbox for that one application, which is specifically directed at complementing Dropbox’s vision.”
Sadalgi said that BetterCloud being a preferred partner means that Dropbox will not resell any other partner in this space. He also said that while Dropbox is selling a version of BetterCloud that is limited because it provides a deep and secure integration only with the Dropbox app, it will expose BetterCloud to many more Dropbox customers.
“We could then upsell them on the fuller version of BetterCloud which supports the other SaaS applications,” Sadalgi indicated. “We are hoping that this will be an exponential increase for us, in which we get thousands of new customers, not hundreds. Dropbox has hundreds of thousands of customers, and we expect this to be sold aggressively next year.”
The other component is the new functionality added as part of the deeper integration with Dropbox.
“We have automated workflows around user orchestration and data protection for onboarding and offboarding, to make sure that new Dropbox Business accounts conform with security policies,” Sadalgi said. “We are also working to release deeper content scanning capabilities for Dropbox, and expect to release that later this year.”
While the enhanced Dropbox partnership deepens BetterCloud’s relationship around one vendor, their other announcement from Altitude adds many new integrations to their core solution. The company originally began in 2011 as a SaaS platform focused on the management and security of Google G Suite, and expanded beyond that to provide similar integrations with ten vendors.
“BetterCloud Integration Center is another gamechanger announcement for us because it takes us far beyond supporting those ten SaaS integrations,” Sadalgi said . “It achieves a breakout philosophy in terms of shipping them, with 32 new ones. That’s an exponential increase. We have figured out a scalable way to do these, so that we will be able to do 20-30 of these integrations every quarter.” The vendors now supported include Zoom, Atlassian, Smartsheet, Docusign, GitHub, VMware Workspace One, OneLogin, Pagerduty, Intercom, AWS, Tableau, Duo, Splunk, Datadog.
“While all these new integrations are done by us, the Integration Center is also an exchange for integrations developed by our customers and partners,” Sadalgi added. “This is a slick way for customers to build their own custom integrations, which other customers can leverage right away.”
BetterCloud will host a live webinar on Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 2pm ET to provide an overview of the BetterCloud Integration Center. Registration details are here.
The company will also launch its BetterCloud Technology Integration Partner Program [TIPP] later this Fall. The program is a framework that fosters an ecosystem of best-in-class technology companies to build integrations with BetterCloud’s SaaSOps platform.
