#HewlettPackardEnterprise CEO @MegWhitman is joining the board of directors at #Dropbox, the cloud file storage company announced Monday. Whitman, who had recently been a candidate for the Uber CEO position, "will help Dropbox reach new heights," company CEO Drew Houston wrote in a blog post. He said Whitman has been a "trusted friend and advisor to me for years." [Related: HPE CEO Whitman To Channel: I Have A Long-Term Commitment To HPE, Partners, And 'The Mission We Are On'] "Her experience and judgment will be invaluable to Dropbox as we continue to grow and scale," Houston wrote, citing her experience both with HPE and with scaling eBay as its CEO during its early years. San Francisco-based Dropbox has been valued at $10 billion since a funding round in 2014, and some reports have suggested that an initial public offering could be coming for the company by the end of the year. Dropbox has built out its cloud infrastructure with the help of HPE, and HPE is also a Dropbox customer, Houston noted in the blog post. In June 2016, Whitman highlighted a deal that saw Dropbox move some of its cloud storage services business from Amazon Web Services to an HPE cloud solution as a way to, the companies said, improve flexibility and save money. "What we see in Dropbox is potentially the beginning of a trend, which is once you get to a certain requirement, certain scale, certain compliance requirements, that actually being in the public cloud is not the answer to every question," Whitman told CRN in an interview at the time. Meanwhile, HPE has more than 100,000 employees using the Dropbox storage service. In his blog post, Houston wrote that discussions around Whitman "taking on a more official role" at Dropbox had begun earlier this year. In an interview with CRN this month, Whitman said she is firmly committed to leading HPE into the future. "I would like to underscore to partners that I have a long term commitment to HPE and to the partners and to the mission that we are on," Whitman told CRN. "Yes, I talked to Uber [about the CEO job] at the end of their process because it is a business model I am very familiar with. It reminds me of eBay [where Whitman was CEO from 1998 to 2008] in many ways. But it wasn't the right thing. I think HPE is very special in its own right." Whitman's pledge of long-term commitment to HPE came as the company delivered better-than-expected earnings results for its fiscal third quarter, ended July 31. That included an increase in core server sales of 13 percent, along with 200 percent growth in SimpliVity hyper-converged infrastructure sales and 30 percent growth in all-flash sales driven by Nimble.
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