An important business philosophy that we have here at OfficeDrop is the concept of “Frenemies” – we will work with other services that would historically have been considered competition if it makes sense for our customers. It means that we value our customers’ workflow and actively look to integrate our cloud filing system with other online, cloud and SaaS services that our customers are using. Our customers are small businesses who want to move to a “digital office” and away from having their different work processes silo’ed into particular, proprietary applications.

What’s a Frenemy (or Frienemy, depending on how you spell it)?

We believe that the cloud has changed the way software will be used. Old, desktop software that wrote special, unique and proprietary files and that trapped your data are out. Remember when a file could only be opened by the program that created it? Well, in the cloud all the smart providers have open APIs, which means your data can now be pushed (securely, of course!) from one application to another – making it easier for you to get your work done. This means that our service may have to work with other online storage companies, or companies that have overlapping features. Should we be competing with these companies and avoid integrating with them?

No.

We can only survive if our clients WANT to use our service. They can get their data out at any time, so we need to offer the best paper-focused, searchable storage service we can – and let customers use other best in class services in conjunction with ours – like our FreshBooks document management integration. We’ve got an open API, and if someone who might be close in features wants to connect with our service they are very much able to create a tight integration with the OfficeDrop service.

OfficeDrop Articles on the Frenemy Concept

Prasad wrote about how competing in the cloud is making companies frenemies in TechCrunch. Today he penned one on “Building a Business Around Frienemies” for FastCompany.

Frienemies