Dropbox and Salesforce forge major integration pact
Video: Dropbox tends to freelance worker needs with Showcase
Dropbox and Salesforce have announced a significant integration pact that will more tightly link their platforms for joint customers.
Featured
The primary integrations center around Salesforce's Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Quip platforms, and creating native, two-way access between these platforms and Dropbox.
More specifically, executives from both Salesforce and Dropbox said the companies are focused on two key areas as the integrations roll out: Brand engagement and digital asset management, and productivity and collaboration for teams in a cloud environment.
On the brand engagement front, Salesforce EVP of business development and strategy Ryan Aytay said the integration will lead to branded Dropbox folders inside of Salesforce Commerce and Marketing Clouds that can be accessed by both team members and external partners, like creative agencies or lawyers, for example.
"Bringing that content together and creating a two-way workflow is what we are focused on here," said Aytay.
Read also: IBM, Salesforce expand AI partnership for deeper customer insights
The collaboration and productivity side centers around Quip. The integration will bring Dropbox into Quip so files can be accessed from within Quip and vice versa.
"The goal is to bring together and further integrate our platforms and build new tools," said Dropbox COO Dennis Woodside. "We have been partners for four years, but this is taking everything to a new level in terms of bringing our two companies together. This is entering a strategic partnership of a different magnitude."
Longer term, the companies said they want to extend the integrations to the consumer channel. For instance, an automotive company using Commerce Cloud would be able to update a vehicle owner's manual directly into a consumer's Dropbox account.
"We're seeing this as a way to share content between companies and their end users," Aytay said.
"And we think it will provide insights into how end users engage with content, by extending the capabilities of Commerce Cloud into a B2C engagement," added Woodside. The companies also plan to co-market at events to highlight and push the new integrations, which are expected to roll out in the second half of 2018.
Up until now, Dropbox has offered the Dropbox for Salesforce app in the Salesforce AppExchange. Meanwhile, Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce's corporate investment group, has been an investor in Dropbox since 2014.
Of course, the Salesforce partnership comes just after Dropbox filed for an initial public offering, putting to rest years of speculation as to when the company would enter the public market.
Read also: A day in the data science life: Salesforce's Dr. Shrestha Basu Mallick
Since confirming its IPO intentions, Dropbox also announced a partnership with Google to develop a series of cross-platform integrations that connect G-Suite's cloud tools with the Dropbox collaboration platform.
That partnership is also notable because Dropbox and G Suite are competitive rivals. In its IPO disclosure, Dropbox noted that it competes with Google in both the cloud storage and content collaboration markets.
Previous and related coverage
Salesforce wants you to have a conversation with your data. But first, it needs to suggest visualizations and charts and answer questions in plain English for those of us who aren't data wonks.
Salesforce posts solid Q4, surpasses $10B in annual sales
The CRM giant beat market expectations for earnings and revenue.