Dropbox's New Finance Hire Signals Possible IPO

(RTTNews) - Speculation of a Dropbox IPO intensified after the cloud storage service named Vanessa Wittman as chief financial officer, who has served at public companies including Motorola.

Organizations planning IPO are usually known to hire CFO with experience at public companies. Dropbox had earlier said IPO was an eventuality, and strengthens that speculation by naming Wittman as finance head.

Wittman, who will step in as Dropbox CFO next month, replaces Sujay Jaswa who has a venture capital background.

"There are very few companies that have the potential to completely shape the way we interact with technology on a daily basis," Wittman said. "This is what has attracted me to Dropbox."

Wittman most recently served as CFO at Motorola Mobility, and earlier held a similar position at Marsh & McLennan Cos. She also held top posts at Microsoft and Morgan Stanley.

Wittman is not the only Motorola Mobility executive at Dropbox. Dennis Woodside, current chief operating officer at Dropbox, had served in an executive capacity at the former Google unit.

Based in San Francisco, California, Dropbox offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.

The company operates a namesake file hosting service that allows users to create a special folder on their computers, which Dropbox then synchronizes so that it appears to be the same folder and with the same contents regardless of which computer is used to view it.

Dropbox Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston earlier had parried questions about an IPO, and said that the company had raised enough money to keep going.

The company's smaller rival Box went public in January, raising $175 million. Its stock price is now up about 50 percent on the IPO price.

There seem to be another reason gaining ground as to Wittman's appointment, with USA Today suggesting that this was only to ensure Dropbox is not known as a boy's club; the staff at Dropbox strongly outnumber women.