Dropbox, which reports its numbers this week, is expected to benefit from the move to remote working. It has been building its channel business over the last year or so, and with a new channel programme on board, is looking to become more of a platform, integrated with wider SaaS applications.
Simon Aldous, global head of channels says it is an interesting time. “The challenge for everyone is that the impact in the wider business community is significant and there are a lot of people struggling. It is tough for everyone.”
He is seeing very different scenarios across the customer base. “The SMB space is really tough- supported by SMB partners – cash flow, furloughing and working out how to survive. So it is difficult for their IT partners who are also working with furloughed staff and reduced business.”
There is no capacity to buy additional technology – they need to do more with what they have. “We have seen accelerated discussion on migration to the cloud and remote working, decommissioning on-prem servers etc. That is a lot of what we have been doing.”
“In the mid-market, we have seen a lot of upselling of licenses and work on data migration and integrations into SaaS apps like Salesforce, Google, Slack etc. Partner are seeing the opportunity to upsell and drive new business.”
“Over the last four years of understanding the channel, as we move from direct-selling, that we have found a core value with partners who self-certify as MSPs or CSPs where Dropbox is part of a managed solution. It becomes an underlying integrated platform that works with their applications and allows them to deploy SaaS across their workforce, on whatever device. That is how we have been building the business and how we have redefined the partner programme which has just been relaunched.“
“We have built three specific accreditations – for sales, administration and we are about to launch the deployment specialist. This gives partners to core skills they need on positioning, sell support and deploy Dropbox as part of a managed service. We need to make sure that our partners can integrate with all the other SaaS apps, and the new deployment specialist drives the integration. Where Dropbox is built into how the business works is where we see the greatest success and longevity in the customer lifecycle.”
Dropbox is strong in several verticals: media and communications, construction, education and similar with a high degree of collaboration, he says, and so it has built sales cases for these and shows how it works in these, but the crisis has perhaps made demand all more horizontal with everyone needing remote working. “Remote working will become acceptable for many more organisations in future.”
And the message has changed: over the last four years, security has gone from being a leading question to just one of those being asked, he says. Dropbox and others have done a lot of work on educating the market and winning trust on security. “We drive that at the heart of what we do. Now the issues are around how data can be integrated and made available. So we talk about security and we have discussion, but we are in a much better place.”
