Microsoft Selects SkyKick as a 2013 Partner of the Year Award Winner

Company recognized in Cloud Startup category for redefining approach to Office 365 migrations

Seattle – May 23, 2013 – SkyKick (www.skykick.com), the easiest way to Office 365, today announced Microsoft has selected the company as the winner for the Cloud Startup Partner of the Year – Developed Markets. The Microsoft Partner of the Year awards honor Microsoft partners for delivering innovative solutions during the past year that directly address customer challenges. Microsoft recognized SkyKick for the SkyKick Application Suite that helps IT Consultants, System Integrators, Managed Service Providers, Value-Added Resellers and other IT partners automate an entire Office 365 migration project from initial sales to project completion for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

"Microsoft's Partner of the Year awards recognize some of the best in the Microsoft community, and we are both humbled and honored to be in their company," said SkyKick co-founder and co-CEO Todd Schwartz. "This is just the start of a long journey for us, and we are excited to be awarded Microsoft's Cloud Startup Partner of the Year for our early contributions to Microsoft's partner ecosystem and the Office 365 business."

SkyKick launched its beta application in the middle of 2012, which has now been used by hundreds of partners to move their customers to Office 365. Traditionally, migration tools on the market have focused on moving server-side data, which is one step in an overall migration consulting project. The SkyKick Application Suite takes a new and 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. After migrating thousands of SMBs, the SkyKick Application Suite emerged from beta in April 2013.

"We're proud to be recognized by Microsoft for our innovative approach to migrating small and medium businesses to Office 365," said SkyKick co-founder and co-CEO Evan Richman. “We're solving an incredibly hard technology problem so expect to see more product enhancements in the coming months to further our mission of making it easier for Microsoft partners to move their customers to Office 365."

This year, Microsoft selected 44 Microsoft Partner of the Year winners out of more than 3,000 entries. The recipients of the 2013 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards will be recognized at this year's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, held July 7-11 in Houston. For a complete list of this year's Microsoft Partners of the Year, go to http://www.digitalwpc.com/Awards/Pages/Home.aspx#fbid=bBs3qCKXfsM.

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 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 Listed Among Top Finalists for the 2012 Microsoft Office 365 Innovation Partner of the Year Award

Today, SkyKick announced it has been selected as a finalist for the Microsoft Office 365 Innovation Partner of the Year Award.
 
"SkyKick is honored to be named a Microsoft Office 365 Innovation Partner of the Year Award finalist.   We developed our technology and online service with the objective of making it easy and affordable for small businesses to get to Office 365 and this award recognizes the value we've delivered in helping thousands of small business get to the cloud in the past year," said Evan Richman, SkyKick co-founder.

Awards were presented in multiple categories, with winners chosen from a set of nearly 3,000 entrants worldwide. The Microsoft Office 365 Innovation Partner of the Year Award recognizes the partner using Microsoft Office 365 technology to create, market, and sell a truly innovative solution. The winner developed flexible, scalable, robust applications using the Office 365 platform, and demonstrated innovation, competitive differentiation, and customer value while showcasing the benefits of using Office 365 in unique scenarios.
 
"We are proud to recognize our 2012 Partner Award finalists for their outstanding commitments to solving customer challenges," said Jon Roskill, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. "Our partners are critical to our success as a company, and it is their creativity and innovative thinking in solving the unique needs of our customers that serves as the foundation for mutual, long-term success. We congratulate this year's finalists on their achievements and look forward to following their continued success in the future."
 
"SkyKick's mission is to be a champion for small business by helping them realize the power of technology to do things they never could before.  SkyKick's self-service, online migration applications make it easy and affordable for small business owners to move their business to Office 365, in just a few minutes, without any IT experience or staff required," said Todd Schwartz, SkyKick co-founder. 

SkyKick's applications run on its proprietary cloud technology platform and are designed to make it easy to move entire businesses to the cloud, or from cloud-to-cloud.  The email migration application automatically creates a personalized migration project plan, configures Office 365, moves a company's mission critical email, calendar, and contacts and manages, handles all the complex IT changes like DNS changes, and helps company's manage the change with easy to use tools and training.  SkyKick has also developed a website migration application, that automatically moves and reactivates Office Live websites on Office 365.
 
The Microsoft Partner Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year.

About SkyKick

SkyKick is the easiest way to Office 365 for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).  SkyKick offers self-service online applications that make it easy and affordable to move any business to Office 365, in just a few minutes, with no IT experience required. 

For more on our services please visit www.skykick.com or follow us on @getskykick.