Dropbox: Impressive Innovations and Big Expectations

Leading collaboration platform Dropbox is set to reveal its first-quarter results as a public company on Thursday, and investors are expecting results to beat analyst estimates. The cloud-storage company raised nearly a billion dollars in its IPO in April, and its shares' valuation has significantly increased since then.

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The company, founded in 2007, is currently valued at more than $11 billion.

Although the majority of Dropbox's users do not pay for file storage, the company states that it has more than 11 million paying subscribers out of approximately 500 million registered users. Dropbox operates under a “freemium” business model, which consists in providing a basic version of its product for free in hope users will upgrade to paid subscription plans offering more features.  

To attract customers and stack up with competition, the company pours money into research and development to optimize its tools and offer innovative functions.

In March, Dropbox formed a strategic partnership with leading CRM platform Salesforce. The idea, Salesforce explains on its website, is to enable businesses of all types and sizes “to collaborate and more deeply connect with their customers across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.” The companies aim to launch two new integrations to drive brand engagement and boost team productivity.

The first integration, called Digital Asset Engagement, allows users to create customized Dropbox folders within Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud features. Content stays accessible  and up-to-date whether users are working in Dropbox or Salesforce.

The second integration gives access to Dropbox content such as photos, videos and slides, directly within Salesforce Quip. Dropbox  also added support for Quip documents.

In addition to these innovations, the partners plan to make more use of each others' products. New integrations will be available in the second half of 2018.

Salesforce is currently one of the most highly valued American computing companies, with a market capitalization above $100.  

There is a lot of pressure on freshly public tech brands like Dropbox to exceed Wall Street's expectations, namely because of the impressive performance of giant tech companies like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon.