Channel hitting the SME market for Dropbox

The channel was one of the fastest growing parts of the Dropbox business last year as partners managed to mine a rich seam in the SME market.

Smaller firms have been turning to partners to help them rollout and integrate the collaboration tools from Dropbox, rather than taking a self service approach.

That trend has seen channel sales increase and made the SME-facing reseller community one that the firm is looking to support via its distributor Ingram Micro.

Simon Aldous, global head of channels at Dropbox, said that it had made conscious efforts to make its channel proposition a clear one, with customers at the small business end of the spectrum a clear reseller target, and it was having an impact.

"Channel was one of the fastest go to markets at Dropbox last year and we saw real growth from having more of a transparent structure," he said.

"We have been building a channel for three years. The general consensus is that it takes seven years to build a channel from scratch so we aren't even half way there but we are in a very good place," he added.

Aldous said more SMEs were looking for content and collaboration tools and struggling with increasing amounts of data and that played into the hands of its channel partners.

"They want to take advantage of more SaaS based applications but they need to have some control and we are giving them that control," he said.

He added that there were some partners that had embraced the cloud and were taking advantage of growth opportunities but many were not selling more than just a single hosted application and there was plenty of room for growth.

"We want to educate partners and help them go through that transition. We see a massive challenge and a massive opportunity," he concluded.