Dropbox, the file-sync-store-and-share provider to the masses, will host its inaugural developers conference this summer. The event — called DBX — will take place July 9 at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.
Details other than that are sparse but in a blog post the company said it hopes to draw developers and partners wanting to learn about the “Dropbox Platform” and to meet the engineering and design team behind the Dropbox APIs.
Dropbox now modestly claims “more than 100 million users” and has caused considerable angst among IT heavyweights including Microsoft and IBM, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Microsoft launched SkyDrive — which as of Monday claims 250 million users – in part to catch some of that Dropbox lightning in a bottle.
IBM forbid the use of Dropbox by its employees, citing security concerns. In fact, many IT staffs across the board view Dropbox and other consumer-grade storage services with anxiety. Their worst nightmare is that employees will send and store sensitive corporate data to this public service. Dropbox has become the epitome of shadow IT.
Those concerns sparked an explosion of startups angling to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise.
Dropbox has been making moves to make its business version more IT friendly. But the vast bulk of the company’s hundred million users are no doubt on the consumer service.
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