This is going to be big!

The team here at OfficeDrop was glued to the live updates on Apple’s new iOS and iCloud… and we got pretty excited.

While some pundits have been claiming that iCloud will kill existing document sync, access, collaboration and sharing startups, we think otherwise. OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, was quoted in Macworld and conveyed our excitement about the new announcement. From the Macworld article:

Prasad Thammineni, OfficeDrop’s CEO, said he saw opportunity. Apple’s new service, he said, isn’t necessarily oriented toward business-sized customers—but it could educate those customers about the advantages of cloud storage and expand his company’s market.

“It’s going to educate consumers to say ‘I want my data to go where I go.’ That will prompt customers and small businesses to say they want to do their data the same way,” Thammineni said. He added: “So for us, we see this as a big positive thing.”

We have reason to be so optimistic about Apple’s iCloud. When Microsoft began their “To the Cloud” campaign in November of 2010, we saw our keyword “cloud” related search traffic double from the previous month. And today, this traffic is up 5x what it was before Microsoft began educating the world about the cloud. (Note that while all search traffic for OfficeDrop has grown in that timeframe, it hasn’t grown anything like cloud related traffic. And there was a very distinct, positive change in the cloud related search traffic growth pre and post Microsoft campaign.)

Apple’s iCloud efforts will help propel cloud usage to the masses (or at least beyond the early adopters.) And since Apple is so laser focused on the consumer, OfficeDrop’s target customer base of small business owners will be left searching for a solution that meets their special needs. According to research that we’ve seen, last year only 11% of small businesses were using cloud based SaaS solutions – up from 8% the year before, but still a tiny percentage. And once you go cloud you are 4x more likely to try another cloud solution. If Apple can pull this off they will be the first baby-step into cloud services that our potential customers need!

Finally, our ScanDrop scanning software app thrives on scanning paper into people’s cloud based accounts, and is really designed for customers who use multiple cloud services. So one more strong cloud offering is quite good for ScanDrop, and will help our Mac ScanDrop scanner software revenue grow.