SkyKick Named Microsoft Cloud Startup Partner of the Year

A little more than a year ago, we released the beta version of the SkyKick Application Suite. And over the course of the past year, we have passionately pursued our mission to help make it easier for Microsoft Partners to move their SMB customers to Office 365.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that Microsoft has recognized the technology and progress that we have made by awarding SkyKick the Cloud Startup Partner of the Year Winner for Developed Markets!

We'd like to take a brief moment to thank all of SkyKick's partners, investors, friends and especially - our team - for all their contributions and commitment they provided to help us get to where we are today. We are both humbled and honored to win this award. And we look forward to continuing to innovate to help partners move their customers to Office 365 in the years ahead.

Todd, Evan and Brad

Introducing the SkyKick Application Suite – A New Way to Migrate to the Cloud

Hi there again. It’s been a while since we last blogged, but we’re excited to jump back on and tell you about the progress we’ve made. Over the last couple years the team has been working incredibly hard building out our migration platform, and today we are pleased to officially announce the release of the SkyKick Application Suite (you can read the official release below).

The SkyKick Application Suite, simply put, is a new type of cloud migration application that helps IT partners provide a superior migration experience for their customers by helping automate many aspects of the Office 365 migration project from initial sales to project completion for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Traditionally, “migration tools” on the market have been focused on moving server-side data, which is just 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. So in a way, not only are we announcing a new product today, but we’re also introducing a new category of cloud migration technology that makes it easy for SMB partners to move the entire business to the cloud.

As you can imagine, applying technology to automate what has traditionally been a multi-week, people intensive IT services project is an ambitious undertaking. Email migrations involve hundreds of project tasks, for all the permutations of customer scenarios that can exist, for thousands of different email systems in the SMB space. That’s the technology challenge the team has tackled, and that’s the partner pain we’ve addressed with the release of the SkyKick Application Suite.

Over the last twelve months in beta we’ve tested and refined the technology and experience by moving thousands of SMB’s and working with hundreds of fantastic partners like CyberStreams, LanLogic, and Centarus. All this learning has helped us build the “project algorithms” and refine the beta version of the product to help get us to where we are at today.

Our mission is to help partners move their customers to the cloud. So we are quite excited about the feedback we’ve received from our beta partners so far. But while we’ve made a lot of progress on our product and technology platform to date, this is really just the v1 of the product. We have much more yet to do, and the team here at SkyKick remains dedicated, passionate and even a bit maniacal about continually making our platform better, faster, and easier for our partners.

So thanks for stopping by. If you’re an IT professional or services firm, we encourage you to take a minute to register to become a SkyKick partner – it’s fast, easy and free. If you’re a customer and want your company to get the SkyKick migration experience to Office 365, please give one of our featured partners a call.

Thanks again for stopping by - we look forward to helping you grow your business in the cloud.

- The Team @ SkyKick

SkyKick Creates New Way to Migrate SMBs to Cloud; Launches Application Suite to Help Microsoft Partners Move Customers to Office 365

Company announces nearly $4 million raised to date; Hundreds of partners and thousands of SMBs have used SkyKick to move to Office 365

Seattle - April 23, 2013 - SkyKick (www.skykick.com), the easiest way to Office 365, today announced the launch of the SkyKick Application Suite, 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:

• Web Planner-An online sales, assessment, planning, configuration, and project management application designed to help partners streamline the migration planning process.
• Migration Sync -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.
• Outlook Assistant- 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.

About SkyKick

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 www.skykick.com

SkyKick is a Microsoft Office 365 Innovation Partner Award Finalist

"Today we have some exciting news to share.  After a year of working on our technology to make it easy for small businesses to get to the cloud, we have been selected amongst over 3,000 partners by Microsoft as an Office 365 Innovation Partner Award Finalist.  Our team has put thousands of hours of development into simplifying a complex and costly IT services project and turning it into an easy-to-use and affordable online application to help any business move to Office 365.  So naturally we are a bit proud of this award as it recognizes the value we’ve been delivering to small businesses, as well as value we've created for the industry over the past year. 
 
We'd like to send our congratulations as well to Wortell who won the award, as well as Accenture/Avenade as the other co-finalist.

If you're a customer or a partner and are in Toronto for the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) July 8th – 12, feel free to stop by and say hello at the Office Theatre Session "How to migrate to Office 365 in 10 minutes, With No IT Experience Required" at 6:00-7:30pm in the Solution Innovation Center (Expo) Reception. 
 
For the full copy of our press release can be found here. Thanks again for stopping by and we look forward to helping move more businesses to cloud in the year ahead."
 
SkyKick Team

Because, once, we all started small

We know you’re busy, so huge thanks for stopping by to read our company’s first blog post.
 
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of our company - SkyKick.  Our company’s mission is to make technology easy for small businesses, so we’ll keep this blog post short and sweet.
 
This is just the start for us, but we hope you’ll try our application, like what you see, and give us your feedback.
 
Welcome to SkyKick.