SEATTLE, WA — (Marketwired) — 04/23/13 — (), the easiest way to Office 365, today announced the launch of the , a new type of migration technology for IT Consultants, System Integrators, Managed Service Providers, Value-Added Resellers and other IT partners, that helps them automate an entire Office 365 migration project from initial sales to project completion for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). SkyKick, which has raised more than $3.7 million to date, has been successfully used to move thousands of SMBs to Office 365 during the last year its migration suite has been in beta, and is now available immediately to all IT partners. Migration tools on the market today have primarily focused on moving server-side data, which is one step in an overall migration consulting project. The SkyKick Application Suite takes a different approach by helping partners manage many of the steps of a migration project including the sales, planning, migration and on-site phases of their customer-s move to Office 365. This enables new cloud partners to get in the Office 365 game, and experienced cloud partners to scale their Office 365 practice.
A typical 25-seat Office 365 SMB project requires an average of 40 hours of partner effort from sales through project completion*, and can vary in time and quality depending on many email system factors. With the SkyKick Application Suite, partners can streamline the entire migration process for customers by using a cloud-based project management system. This enables partners to improve sales velocity, reduce project risk and complexity, simplify the management of the migration project, while providing a high quality migration project for customers.
“We partnered with SkyKick in hopes of scaling our Office 365 practice at a faster rate… goal achieved,” said Thomas Allen at CyberStreams. “SkyKick allowed us to simplify our migration model; completing more migrations, with less risk of error, and at less cost to the customer.”
Co-CEOs Evan Richman and Todd Schwartz, who held various leadership positions on Microsoft-s Office and Bing teams, and CTO Brad Younge, employee number three at Drugstore.com, founded SkyKick in 2011. SkyKick began migrating SMBs to Office 365 as part of a beta program in the middle of 2012, and since then has on boarded hundreds of partners and moved thousands of businesses.
“Moving Microsoft-s SMB Office base to the cloud is a massive undertaking and will require high engagement from Microsoft-s vast partner base,” said Richman. “SkyKick takes what has traditionally been a two to six week IT services project and makes it more transactional and scalable creating a win-win market scenario — any Microsoft partner can easily and profitably move their SMB customers to Office 365, giving SMBs a great experience at a great value.”
According to Schwartz, “To help partners move millions of SMBs to the cloud we tackled a huge technology challenge — how do we automate hundreds of project tasks, accounting for all the permutations of customer scenarios, and the thousands of different email systems that exist with SMBs? The SkyKick platform is designed to simplify that complexity at scale. We built a powerful engine under the hood, and an elegant interface on top — kind of like search. The result is the SkyKick Application Suite which simplifies migration projects so partners can sell more Office 365, with less effort and risk, while providing a superior experience for their customers.”
The SkyKick Application Suite is a patent-pending, integrated cloud-based migration project solution consisting of three products that work together to move the business to Office 365:
— An online sales, assessment, planning, configuration, and project management application designed to help partners streamline the migration planning process.
— An online service that moves the customer-s account and user information; email server data like email, calendar, contacts, aliases, distribution groups and other data, as well as the required DNS settings.
— A lightweight client app that addresses many of the last-mile challenges that make or break the overall migration experience. It configures Outlook and moves client-side data to reduce the friction and frustration for end users, and reduces post-migration support for partners.
Office 365 is a Microsoft-hosted suite that includes Word Online, Excel Online, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online. As of February 2013, Microsoft reported that one in five of Microsoft-s enterprise customers had implemented Office 365, up from one in seven a year ago. At the same time, Microsoft claimed that the number of SMBs using Office 365 grew by 150 percent since February 2012.
SkyKick is a new kind of migration application that makes it fast, safe and easy for IT partners to move small and medium-sized businesses to Office 365. SkyKick-s award-winning Application Suite helps partners manage all the steps of a migration project including the sales, planning, migration and on-site phases of their customer-s move to Office 365. SkyKick is headquartered in Seattle. For more information visit
*Internal SkyKick research.
Andrew Goss
VOXUS PR for SkyKick
253.444.5446
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