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Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company GoDaddy and software giant Microsoft announced a long-term strategic partnership to offer Office 365 as GoDaddy’s exclusive core business-class email and productivity service to its small-business customers.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft created a unique offering of domain-based email and storage especially built with GoDaddy’s very small businesses in mind.
The strategic agreement between the two companies provides small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) with access to professional email connected to their domain names, cloud storage and a full suite of Microsoft productivity solutions.
The platform offers business-class email, shared calendars, instant messaging, online conferencing and access to the most up-to-date documents. These capabilities are delivered as a cloud service available to users wherever they are, online or offline, and across a variety of devices, offering access to the most up-to-date versions of their files and tools.
“Combining our small-business expertise together with Microsoft’s productivity offerings opens new doors for small businesses to easily get the tools they need to get more done in their day,” Steven Aldrich, senior vice president of business applications at GoDaddy, said in a statement. “We’ve created a simple way to attach Office 365 to a domain name, helping small-business owners look professional and work anywhere, making the business of running their business easier.”
The platform includes built-in security features that help deflect malware, spam, phishing attacks and other threats. Office 365 from GoDaddy is currently available in the United States and Canada and will expand globally within the next three months.
“We’re excited that GoDaddy has chosen to exclusively offer Office 365 to its small- business customers, giving them easy and supported access to productivity tools being used by some of the most successful businesses in the world,” John Case, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, said in a statement. “GoDaddy’s relationship with small businesses combined with Office 365, the fastest-growing Microsoft product in history, will help bring the benefits of Office 365 and modern cloud services to even more companies, whether they’re seeking to modernize how they do business or simply starting up.”
According to a Boston Consulting Group global study commissioned by Microsoft, if more small and medium-sized businesses adopted the latest in IT tools, it could potentially boost their revenues by a combined $770 billion and create more than 6 million jobs.
GoDaddy has recently teamed up with Microsoft and Parallels to create a new Windows-based Web hosting offering option designed to give customers better performance, more stability and an easy-to-use interface to manage their accounts by leveraging Windows Server 2012.
The addition of Parallels Plesk Panel helps save Web professionals time by simplifying tasks such as managing databases, configuring domain names and installing content management system (CMS) applications like WordPress and DotNetNuke.