How BetterCloud’s Dropbox Deal, Integration Center Impact Resellers, Other Partners

BetterCloud, which provides a SaaS operations management platform, is on a roll and resellers and other channel partners will want to pay attention.

The eight-year-old vendor has inked an important deal with Dropbox and launched an applications integration center; partners may take advantage of both developments, albeit in different ways.

First, as Dropbox continues its quest to sell its business platform to large organizations, BetterCloud is stepping in to provide data protection and orchestration functionality. This means Dropbox users will be able to enforce custom security policies, scan content for sensitive data and automate processes.

BetterCloud’s Shreyas Sadalgi

“To effectively deploy Dropbox to every employee, you need to orchestrate the life cycle,” Shreyas Sadalgi, chief business strategy officer for BetterCloud, told Channel Futures. “The files need to be available on day one and able to move around in the organization. But there’s a big gap in that we see organizations forgetting offboarding. When someone leaves, their Dropbox files and folders are not transferred to others. They could still be being shared publicly and expose confidential data.”

BetterCloud’s technology addresses that issue, especially as Dropbox goes beyond file sharing and into the smart workspace sector. On that front, Dropbox is bringing together applications such as Slack, Zoom, Atlassian and more into one interface to support holistic collaboration. This shifts management responsibility over to IT or to partners administering Dropbox for clients. These teams all need the right tools and adding BetterCloud to Dropbox for Business meets that requirement.

To that point, VARs will be able to sell and manage BetterCloud for Dropbox once it becomes available later this year; the product is not yet MSP-ready, although BetterCloud aims to make it so within the coming year, Sadalgi said. Meantime, agents, distributors and systems integrators also will be able to sell Dropbox for Business, which will be offered as an add-on product.

“It’s additional monetization for partners. You can sell more value to IT decision-makers,” Sadalgi said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for partners to play a key role in advisory, consultation and implementation throughout life cycle of the product.”

As part of the BetterCloud-Dropbox partnership, Dropbox is investing $5 million in BetterCloud. BetterCloud will use the money to further develop its Dropbox platform and efforts. Partners will indirectly benefit from this financial infusion in the form of sales enablement materials, Sadalgi said. This initiative remains in the beginning stages but enablement will target the Dropbox teams that own reseller, systems integrator and other channel partner relationships.

“If they want to take us with them to partners and bring us in as SMEs, then we’re happy to do that,” Sadalgi said.

BetterCloud’s David Politis

Finally, BetterCloud also has launched its Integration Center, an announcement that will speak to systems integrators and other partners developing APIs for customers.

“SaaS application and data sprawl is growing exponentially,” David Politis, CEO and founder of BetterCloud, said in a prepared statement. “This is why the SaaSOps movement is critical. We launched Platform APIs earlier this year to extend support for any SaaS application. The…

…BetterCloud Integration Center represents the next chapter in this evolution for the IT and SaaSOps community. Now our thousands of customers and trusted partners will have more ways to customize the BetterCloud platform to meet their specific SaaS application management and security needs.”

In essence, the Integration Center serves as a crowd-sourcing hub for managing and securing SaaS applications. Developers, whether from BetterCloud, a partner or a customer, now may build and exchange these integrations. For partners, the capability offers a “win-win,” Sadalgi said.

“They get to solve a use case for a customer so they become even more critical to that customer,” he said. “It’s not just about the BetterCloud product, but customer trust and monetizing other aspects of deployment and implementation. I think the pure transactional nature goes away and the partner becomes a full integrator for the customer.”

So far, BetterCloud and other developers have come up with 42 integrations for applications including Zoom, Atlassian, Smartsheet, Docusign, GitHub, VMware Workspace One, OneLogin, Pagerduty, Intercom, Amazon Web Services, Tableau, Duo, Splunk and Datadog.