Dropbox HQ
Dropbox acquires Clementine – a company based on enterprise communication services.
An official post on Clementine’s website notes that the deal has went through, and the company that was started in 2014, is now part of the Dropbox family. Note that the company, Clementine, will shut down, and all of their assets, and teams are going to be taken under Dropbox’s wing.
Their area of expertise doesn’t quite fit what Dropbox does for a living. You see, Clementine is a company that helps enterprises set a reliable internal communications network – such as conference calls, and other chat services, which aren’t connected to a personal phone number.
While this may be something new that the California-based company wants to tackle, they’ve been working with enterprises for a couple of years now. The company boasts that, at the current moment, they are working with over 100,000 companies, offering full support, and all of the features their service provides.
The news that Dropbox acquires Clementine isn’t really news, to be honest. It was expected of the company to find other areas to sneak into. The cloud storage service is under tight grip by Amazon, and Google, with Microsoft, and Apple coming in strong from behind. Dropbox is there, but their presence doesn’t compare with that of the big G, for example.
” We’re now excited to announce the next stage of our journey — we’re joining Dropbox. Our mission and passion for workplace collaboration remains the same. Our stage will grow dramatically as Dropbox builds on our technology to engage with its over 400 million users and 100,000 businesses.”, notes a spokesperson for the company.
The company boasts that it has 400 million users, and a question arises. How many of them are unique? I, for one, have three Dropbox accounts, and four Google accounts for Google Drive. I want to keep my information spread on different cloud storage providers, and 2 GB just isn’t enough.
Dropbox 400 million users, company states.
Clementine’s free app features will remain in place for their current user-base until the 31st of August, and after that it’s bye bye.
T.J. Keitt, senior analyst with Forrester notes that Dropbox has realized that the enterprise medium requires more variety, and companies that offer this kind of services will lead to a better workflow i.e bigger profits means more money.
Dropbox wants to be a player in the enterprise collaboration space, and I think they believe that they need to do more than synchronize files across devices. Given what Clementine was, we can expect that to be a highly integrated experience that may include voice services in addition to text messaging. It will be very interesting to see what the combined Dropbox and Clementine teams cook up.
Adding more options to choose from makes a lot of sense, and the fact that Dropbox acquires Clementine starts to shape up quite nicely – business will just love this.
