GoDaddy shed some more light on its emerging SMB cloud strategy during an earnings call yesterday. In a small business world where everyone is betting the house on Office 365 management, GoDaddy is hedging its SMB cloud bets.
Sure, GoDaddy is an Office 365 reseller itself. But keep an eye on GoDaddy's developer community -- an emerging class of channel partner that's writing applications for SMB customers. And those applications run on GoDaddy's OpenStack-based cloud.
"It's early days," conceded GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, referring to the fact that GoDaddy's cloud services launched in March 2016. "So over time, we think there's going to be meaning behind the product. I would say the catalyst behind the product and the reason for building it, is that it is clear that there are a variety of applications that our developer community likes to use and they'd like to be able to spin up an instance of that very, very quickly."
The GoDaddy cloud addresses that need, supporting developers that want to spin up applications that involve Joomla, Drupal, Ruby, WordPress and more. The cloud platform is available in 53 markets across 26 languages and 44 currencies, Irving added during the earnings call.
GoDaddy's SMB Cloud Developer Partners
"I would say more than half of our developers on our Pro platform are coming in from outside of the
GoDaddy Revenues, Profits
Although GoDaddy's cloud services are in their infancy, the rest of the company appears to be performing well. For its Q1 ended March 31, 2016, GoDaddy said:
- Total revenue was $433.7 million, up 15.3% vs the corresponding quarter last year.
- Adjusted EBITDA was $115.6 million, up 23.1% vs. the corresponding quarter last year.
Generally speaking, the results beat Wall Street's expectations.
