The cloud-storage giant tells The New Stack that it's paying $350 million for Tigris, a move designed to accelerate Dropbox's own ambitions in selling storage infrastructure to developers and businesses. Indeed, alongside the acquisition news, Dropbox also announced DBX Agent Cloud, an upcoming offering that will initially let developers purchase object storage directly from Dropbox. Dropbox, it's worth noting, is no stranger to building storage infrastructure itself.
Kicking off in 2015, the company moved more than 90% of its user data off Amazon's S3 cloud storage service onto an in-house system dubbed Magic Pocket, in a bid to improve performance and reduce costs. But as Dropbox chief business officer Eric Webster explains, selling storage infrastructure to external customers presents an entirely different set of challenges.
