Guest post by Dan Keldsen

With "Box" in the name of both Dropbox and Box.net, it would be easy to think that both solutions are competing in the same space. But with Dropbox for Teams recently announced, it's even clearer that that's not the intention at all behind Dropbox's latest offering.

The philosophy behind both companies couldn't be more different. Box.net has had SharePoint directly in their sights for years, which is a corporate play. Dropbox has been about empowering individuals with multiple devices who want an easy way to synchronize files.

The eye-popping $250 million dollar round raised by Dropbox makes it even clearer that Dropbox is intended for the consumer market and (maybe) SMBs, who want large amounts of cloud storage at their disposal and, at this point, not much else.

In comparison, Box.net's total raise of $162 million looks almost quaint in comparison, although the announcement just a week prior to Dropbox's had most press commenting on "another bubble" in the making.

The larger capital raise is meant to address the fickle nature and much larger opportunity of both sales to individuals and to teams. Note that the new announcement was not Dropbox for the Enterprise--but Dropbox for Teams.

Honestly, it's a bit puzzling that it has taken Dropbox this long to do much to expand beyond their initial (and tremendous) core growth, and the trust of $250 million dollars worth of investment certainly make it clear that the investors believe there is a large opportunity here.

Lets not forget the security lapses that Dropbox suffered earlier this year, where passwords could be bypassed for somewhere around 4 hours, along with statements that made it clear that the back-end storage was not encrypted from prying eyes, as had been stated. Instead, Dropbox released a statement saying, "if we provide your Dropbox files to a law enforcement agency as set forth above, we will remove Dropbox's encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement," per a blog post written by Dropbox earlier in 2011.

This last statement set the privacy and security world into a tizzy, but as calmer heads mentioned, realistically, any service provider, in order to comply with U.S. regulations, would be required to do this. If you really want "security" then supply your own encryption around the files you care about, wherever they are stored.

Meanwhile, Box.net appears to consider Dropbox competition to a certain extent--with recent pay-per-click ads claiming Box.net is "More Secure than Dropbox and ShareFile!"

On what Dropbox needs to compete in the marketplace, I completely disagree with Forrester's Ted Schadler, quoted in the New York Times as saying "before it would get widespread business adoption, Dropbox needed features like security controls to automatically stop people from sharing confidential documents."

I've consulted on content security for 10 years, and I can count on one finger the number of times I've seen large enterprises want such features. Small to medium businesses? Have never even thought that such a feature could exist, let alone consider it a requirement for a file sync tool.

From my standpoint, both Dropbox and Box.net have healthy futures ahead of them, but on completely separate paths. Neither solution is appropriate for everyone, and there are plenty of valid reasons to chose, or not chose, to use either solution set.

Dan Keldsen is a Partner at Human 1.0 (human1.com), serving as the enterprise client services expert, supporting the innovation and insights team, spending significant time focused on collaboration, innovation and social strategies. Contact him at dan[at]human1[dot]com.