Microsoft Offers Free OneDrive For Business To Customers Of Rival Cloud Storage Products

Looking to motivate some competitive defection, Microsoft Tuesday began offering customers of rival cloud storage solutions free OneDrive for Business use until their contracts with their current providers expire.

"Now your organization can switch to OneDrive for free," Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft, blogged about the new program around the cloud giant's sharing and file management service, a component of Office 365.

The offer applies to existing storage contracts for Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. It continues until June 30, and is only available to customers who commit to 500 seats.

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Enterprises that choose to switch providers based on Microsoft's offer can use the free FastTrack migration service offered by Microsoft to on-board to Office 365, Markezich said.

For Microsoft Office 365 resellers, the offer "just removes one last blocker to getting customers to standardize on OneDrive for Business as their preferred storage solution," said Reed Wiedower, CTO of New Signature.

The Washington, D.C.-based solution provider has seen many customers commit to Office 365, begin migrating their email servers to the cloud-based solution, but then halt adoption of SharePoint because they've already paid for a competing product, Wiedower told CRN.

Being able to say that there’s no additional cost to move to OneDrive for Business for these organizations allows partners to instantly start migrating data for organizations using traditional file servers, rather than migrating email first, which can be a more complex endeavor.

"That allows us to much more easily convert the rest of the organization and move ahead with a truly transformative experience," Wiedower told CRN.

The latest program will especially appeal to organizations that chose storage from Microsoft’s competitors because of cost, he said.

"By migrating to OneDrive for Business with far less investment, they can justify moving multiple workloads to Microsoft 365 over time," Wiedower said.