Microsoft and GoDaddy announce strategic partnership to help small businesses

Partnership gives small-business owners Office 365 productivity advantage coupled with award-winning customer service.

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Jan 13, 2014, 09:00 ET

REDMOND, Wash. and SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Jan. 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- GoDaddy, the Web's top platform for small business, and Microsoft Corp. announced on Monday 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. This partnership supports GoDaddy's ongoing push to deliver premium small-business management solutions. Serving 12 million customers worldwide, GoDaddy has created a simple experience for small businesses to get started with industry-leading productivity tools backed by best-in-class, personalized customer support.

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"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," said Steven Aldrich, senior vice president of Business Applications, GoDaddy. "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 strategic agreement between Microsoft and GoDaddy provides small businesses with seamless access to professional email connected to their domain names, cloud storage and a full suite of Microsoft productivity solutions. Plus, with GoDaddy, users receive around-the-clock live customer service, helping save time best spent focusing on their business. Also 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.

Office 365 offers business-class email, shared calendars, instant messaging, online conferencing and access to the most up-to-date Office 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 the files and tools they need to get things done. Unlike some offerings designed for consumers or small businesses, Office 365 includes built-in security features that help deflect malware, spam, phishing attacks and other threats.

"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," said John Case, corporate vice president, Microsoft Office. "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."

There are an estimated 28 million small businesses in the U.S. alone¹ and 125 million worldwide². Of those 33 million, 92 percent of businesses have fewer than four employees. 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.²

Office 365 from GoDaddy is currently available in the U.S. and Canada and will expand globally within the next three months.

Supporting Resources

Office 365 from GoDaddy video

About GoDaddy
GoDaddy is the world's largest domain name provider, Web hosting provider and new SSL provider, focused on helping small businesses grow larger. GoDaddy provides dozens of cloud-based services and is the largest worldwide mass-market hosting provider by annual revenue according to 451 Research (Mass-Market Hosting Report-Fall 2012) and is the #1 provider of net-new SSL certificates for 2012, according to the Netcraft, LTD Secure Server Survey. To learn more about the company, visit GoDaddy.com/PR.

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

¹ GoDaddy research; U.S. Census Bureau, Longitudinal Business Database 1977–2010, 2009 County Business Patterns, 2010, http://censtats.census.gov/cgi-bin/nonemployer/nonsect.pl, http://www.sba.gov/advocacy/849/12162

² Source: International Finance Corp., member of the World Bank Group, "Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Around the World: How Many Are There, and What Affects the Count?" 2010

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.