Microsoft Partners with GoDaddy to Offer Office 365 to GoDaddy’s Business Customers

Microsoft announced yesterday that it has partnered with GoDaddy to offer Office 365 to GoDaddy’s small-business customers. I think this is a major win for both Microsoft and for GoDaddy. According to Microsoft’s press release:

“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 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.”

Office 365 through GoDaddy is currently available in U.S. and Canada but is expected to expand to the rest of the world in next three months. There are some interesting statistics in the press release.

“There are an estimated 28 million small businesses in the U.S. alone[1] and 125 million worldwide.[2] Of those 28 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]

[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”

GoDaddy is the largest domain name registrar in the world and currently have over 12 million customers around the globe. It also offers Web hosting services.