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Users of Google’s G Suite productivity service will be able to keep their Docs, Sheets, and Slides files inside Dropbox’s cloud storage environment, thanks to a partnership the two tech firms announced today.
It’s a massive win for the cloud storage company, which plans to make the feature available to all of its users, whether they pay for the service or not. In addition, Dropbox Business administrators will be able to manage those files like they would any other content that resides with the service, something that could be a boon to IT and compliance professionals.
This deal is supposed to make Dropbox a unified home for its users’ content and collaboration so they can access their G Suite files alongside all of the other data they store with the service. In addition to the file storage capabilities, Dropbox is also building new integrations with Gmail and Hangouts Chat so that it’s easier for people to share and preview files within those different communication services.
Collaboration between the two technology companies makes a great deal of sense, according to Billy Blau, Dropbox’s head of technology partnerships.
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“It really comes from the fact that we have a big overlap of customer bases,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Over 50 percent of Dropbox Business teams also use G Suite, so both sides see that connection. We have hundreds of millions of users who have Gmail addresses and are also G Suite users.”
Blau said the forthcoming email add-on would allow customers to view rich previews of Dropbox files inside Gmail, something that goes beyond anything the company’s other email integrations offer at the moment. (Dropbox may expand that capability to other services in the future.)
The company’s integration with Google echoes a similar partnership between the tech titan and Box. Those two announced a deal that would allow Box users to store G Suite files inside that company’s enterprise cloud storage and content management environment in October 2016.
That feature hasn’t materialized yet, and Dropbox’s own G Suite storage capability will be in the works for months still. Blau said his company plans to have some sort of file integration with G Suite available by the end of this year, though the feature may still be in beta and may not be rolled out to all the company’s users.
This deal also marks an interesting turn for Dropbox, which has partnered deeply with Microsoft on integrating its storage services into Office 365.
In fact, it has been a significant couple of weeks for Dropbox. Last Friday, the company released its filing for an initial public offering, revealing that it made $1.1 billion in revenue last year. Representatives for the company declined to comment on if or how this partnership could affect that offering.
