GoDaddy Partners with Microsoft to Bring Office 365 to Small Businesses

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Microsoft and GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name register and Web-hosting company, have partnered to bring additional productivity and management solutions to small businesses. The partnership focuses around GoDaddy offering Office 365, an email and productivity service, and cloud storage to small business users through one of three affordable plans.

GoDaddy currently serves 12 million customers globally with its easy-to-use website and productivity tools. According to Steven Aldrich, senior vice president of Business Applications for GoDaddy, the Microsoft deal will enable the company to provide an even better experience for its users:

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. 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.

For small business users, Office 365 brings together document access, online collaboration, instant messaging, shared calendars and business-class email, all in one place. These features are available via the cloud, so that business users can access them from nearly anywhere via a broad range of devices. The suite also provides security features to protect users from spam, phishing scams and malware.

Microsoft’s corporate vice president for its Office products, John Case, says that the partnership brings an already successful tool to even more business users:

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. 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.

The release states that the U.S. has an estimated 28 million small businesses. If more small to midsize businesses (SMBs) adopt up-to-date IT tools, revenues for those companies could increase to $770 billion and create over 6 million new employable positions.