Look! Another storage vendor jumped into the fray offering free storage in an attempt to unseat DropBox from its place as king of the file sync and share universe. And hey, what could be wrong with free? Anybody can walk down to the river – or lake, or ocean – and catch himself a free fish. But what if the person giving you the fish (storage) is a person who sells fish?
Make no mistake, DropBox et al aren’t selling file sync and share tools – they are selling fish, um, storage. So they are giving away some storage in order to get you hooked (get it? Hooked? Fish?) so that they will eventually sell you large amounts of storage.
Listen, your data is already on your servers (or even your PCs) so why do you need “free storage”? Why not just use the storage you must have anyway? You already have security and other oversight in place for that storage, so why not just extend those parameters into the file sync and share arena?
We believe that if you teach a man to fish, you can sell him a wicked cool fishing pole and tackle. Then he can catch all the fish, um storage, he needs.
IT departments can now give users the tools they need to access, sync and share their critical business files, from the device of their choice — within the security parameters set by IT. And users can also incorporate THEIR favorite personal sync and share tool within the corporate ownCloud instance. And they can use their own storage, or, by the way, from a storage vendor of THEIR choice.
You see, we’re not selling storage, we’re selling tools. We’re not competing with the industry, we’re providing the flexibility IT managers need to recapture and control company data, while giving end users the flexibility and ease of use they need to do their job from anywhere. And for those who want a local company to host the storage – we have partners all over the world to help.
The difference is that our partners offer local, trusted environments. They offer a face, a voice, a throat to choke – not just a website offering free storage. And with ownCloud — with open source and open standards – you data can be moved somewhere else – somewhere YOU define, including your own server. If you trust a particular location and provider, or not.
So don’t get sucked in by an offering just because someone is offering you free fish.
It’s YOUR data, YOUR cloud – have it YOUR way.
