YouSendIt rebrands as Hightail to take on Dropbox, Box, Drive, & SkyDrive

When former AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse took over as CEO of file-sharing service YouSendIt a year ago, it was clear he had plans to shake up the company. Now it looks like he is beginning to execute by changing the company’s name to Hightail.

“Hightail is a new identity that represents the current breadth of our services as well as everything we aspire to become,” Garlinghouse wrote in a blog post today. “It also marks the fundamental changes that have happened at our company.”

YouSendIt mostly has been known as a service for sending large attachments to colleagues, friends, and family members when it was too big to be an email attachment. Over the years, YouSendIt has built up quite a following, with 43 million free and paid users.

But the cloud landscape has changed over the years with services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Box offering seamless ways to share large files with lots of people. And YouSendIt doesn’t want to be left behind with a name that limits its future potential.

“Hightail remains an easy and secure way to access and share files and folders on any device … and that’s just what we currently do,” Garlinghouse wrote. “We’ve got big plans to truly transform the world of digital sharing with ideas so exciting and innovative they needed a brand to match.”

One thing it’s pulling out today? Unlimited file storage and sharing for $16 per month. The maximum individual file size is 2GB, and the amount of files you can store is supposedly unlimited.

We’re definitely interested to see where Hightail goes next, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it adds even more features to compete with other cloud storage providers.

Check out the video below for more on today’s moves.