Dropbox has partnered with Deutsche Telekom (DT) in a deal that will see the file-storing and sharing service preloaded on the smartphones of European consumers.
Announcing the deal on Wednesday, Dropbox's vice president, Marc Leibowitz, said the company considered the world's entire online population of 3 billion people to be its potential audience, and said that similar partnerships with other operators were forthcoming.
The deal with Deutsche Telekom is a significant step into Europe with a key operators, yet Leibowitz added that while several countries in central and eastern Europe would be covered by the deal, its home market of Germany is not included.
"Deutsche Telekom is the first of many partnerships," Leibowitz told the Guardian. "DT is making a big jump in testing this with us, and testing with their own users."
Dropbox said it expects the deal will reach millions of DT subscribers in Europe when it rolls out on customers' Android handsets in October, as well as promoting Dropbox to existing Dropbox customers on Android and iOS devices.
Germany has notoriously strict legislation around data protection. Documents revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 showed that in 2013, the NSA stated Dropbox was "coming soon" to the Prism surveillance scheme, and in April 2014 the appointment of the former US secretary of state Condolezza Rice to the Dropbox board caused controversy among users.
In early July, Deutsche Telekom opened a large, specialist, high-security data centre two hours from Berlin and is promoting its high standards of data protection.
"Drew [Houston, CEO] has been outspoken on this from the beginning - privacy and trust are the most important attributes for him and that's part of the reason we were awarded the highest rating of six stars by the Electronic Frontier Foundation," said Leibowitz. "We have invested heavily in physical security and we're happy with our record."
Leibowitz joined Dropbox from Google in 2013. He said the company has grown 200% in 18 months to 300 million users, and that 97% of Fortune 500 companies now use the service.
Leibowitz said there was a symbiosis between Dropbox's services for consumers and for business and that it is investing heavily in both.
He dismissed the concern that Amazon's rival Zocalo service was a threat.
"The market is enormous and we're happy with the progress that we've made so far. We don't think about what everyone else is doing. We're just focused on that market of 3 billion people."
What keeps those at Dropbox up at night, he said, is how to bridge the gap between confident tech consumers and the mainstream.
"That's the pea under our mattress. Dropbox is already ridiculously intuitive – and that's not easy for something as complex under the hood as Dropbox has to be – but we've done a good job reaching 300 million people in a way that speaks to them," he said.
"We hire the brightest people and invest in people and in the platform. We deal with an absurd amount of data, so the challenge is how to make the service appear simple to use."
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