Dropbox will open Australian point of presence hosted in Equinix data centre

Dropbox has announced it will deploy a point of presence (PoP) in Equinix's Sydney data centre to improve upload and download speeds for Australian users.

The PoP will act as a proxy server and enhance performance to complement existing built-in technologies like LAN Sync and Delta Sync.

The proxy will be available to all Dropbox users and will be deployed over the next two months.

Dropbox previously worked with an AWS proxy, which was limited to certain services. With its own proxy hosted in one of Equinix's Sydney data centres, Dropbox said it could now cover traffic for its local user base.

The PoP will be coupled with an open-peering policy, which requires a minimum of 50 Mbps of in-continent traffic destined to or through a user's network. With the open-peering policy, users can reduce their costs and improve speed with a "direct line" connection.

Daniel Iversen, Dropbox head of solutions architecture for Asia-Pacific, placed the ANZ region as one of the top adopters of the vendor's collaborative workspace product Paper.

"Australia is number one in terms of penetration per capita in the adoption of Paper," he told CRN. Paper was released at the end of January.

"Our data shows that Dropbox is being used by ANZ companies to increase their innovation capacity. 

"Workplace communication and collaboration is still extremely fragmented, with people on average using four to five communication channels a day. This represents a huge opportunity to make collaboration simple and effective through a single platform."

The investment is a direct result of Dropbox's growth in the region. Today, 44 percent of ASX 200 companies are Dropbox Business users, growing from last year's 34 percent.

Dropbox also said that 99 percent of the ASX 200 had a Dropbox footprint of some kind.

Among those new customers are Kogan, Airtasker and private construction group Built.

Built chief information officer Wai-Lum Tang said: "Our marketing team works on numerous bids and tenders every week and they often have to pull in information from people who are located across different departments and locations across Australia and around the world. Dropbox has been a lifesaver for this process, as it has allowed us to have multiple people collaborating remotely on documents and drawings in real-time.

"This not only enables us to work quickly to meet strict deadlines, but also significantly improves the overall outcome of the proposals that we put together."

Iversen said Dropbox now had 700 reseller partners, a big jump from last year's count of 200.

"Customers can do business with Dropbox through the partners they are already working with," he said.

Ingram Micro continues to have exclusive distribution access in Australia and New Zealand since the partnership was announced in April 2016.

Dropbox opened its first Australian office in Sydney in April 2014, the first in Asia-Pacific. In early May, managing director Charlie Wood left the cloud storage vendor after almost three years leading the Australian operation. A replacement is yet to be announced.