And so it has taken a big chance on building a cloud of its own. 'What are the next platforms that enterprises are going to build on top of?'ĭropbox wants to be one of them. 'The next major era for this industry is a battle of platforms,' says Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.com. Like the bigger companies, they too deliver tools that businesses and developers can use without setting up their own hardware-the essential appeal of the cloud. These companies fit into a different niche-offering pre-built software applications over the Internet. Drawing on the experience of Silicon Valley veterans who erected similar technology inside Internet giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter, it has successfully moved about 90 percent of those files onto this new online empire.Īt the same time, there's a growing secondary market centered around Dropbox, its arch-rival Box.com,, Workday, and others.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, Dropbox built its own vast computer network and shifted its service onto a new breed of machines designed by its own engineers, all orchestrated by a software system built by its own programmers with a brand new programming language. In other words, those billions of files were stored on Amazon's machines, rather than machines owned and operated by Dropbox.īut not anymore. Amazon's cloud computing service lets anyone build and operate software without setting up their own hardware. Like so many other tech startups in recent years, Dropbox ran its online operation atop what is commonly called 'the Amazon cloud,' a hugely popular service run by, yes, that Amazon-the world's largest online retailer. But, well, the San Francisco startup didn't really store them on its own. It too is building infrastructure so that others don't have to.įor the first eight years of its life, you see, Dropbox stored billions and billions of files on behalf of those 500 million computer users. In fleeing the cloud, Dropbox is showing why the cloud is so powerful.

Dropbox and aws