Not your Dad’s GoDaddy

I requested an introduction to Arne Josefsberg, the new CIO at GoDaddy. I have profiled innovations in the Microsoft Azure, the Facebook Prineville and Google’s data centers in my books. I wanted to learn more about the infrastructure at the largest web hosting firm in the world – over 55 million domains registered, 5 million sites hosted, 350 million emails processed each day and other striking metrics like 2.5 million cyberattacks thwarted each hour. Not surprisingly, Arne has worked at or with executives at each of the Azure, Prineville and Google elite data center environments. We spent a bit of time on the OpenStack commitment at GoDaddy, but far more interesting was his description of how the business is evolving since new CEO Blake Irving came over from Yahoo! last year.

I wrote recently about the growing spectrum of offerings VARs are bringing to SMEs – video surveillance, point-of-sale etc. GoDaddy wants to fly lower, but with a global brand. It plans a store with an even broader set of application and infrastructure services to the lower end of the SME market. It estimates there are 28 million businesses in the US with 5 employees or less. This audience, with minimal IT expertise, needs highly reliable and turnkey services and GoDaddy is building its portfolio of services in 3 ways:

a) Acquisitions

GoDaddy has made a steady stream of acquisitions including Outright and Ronin for online accounting and invoicing, Locu which offers discovery marketing (exposes businesses to 200-million consumers per month through its partnerships with Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor and other channels) M.dot for developing mobile web sites and Media Temple a vertical play aimed at creative professionals.

b) Partnerships

These include a large relationship with Microsoft to offer Office 365 as GoDaddy’s exclusive core business-class email and productivity service. Others include a payment solution partnership with First Data and web content hosting to  over 2 million WordPress sites.

c) Globalization

If the US market offers plenty of promise, the 125 million small shops worldwide offer an even more tantalizing opportunity. Arne says GoDaddy could be in 60 countries in the next couple of years. They are particularly excited about their success in India.  They have offered .IN domain names for 5 years and  launched full-scale operations in India last year and saw revenue there grow 86%. They presumably have also learned from their China experience where in 2010 they stopped registering Web sites in response to concerns about censorship and privacy protection.  As it grows globally, GoDaddy has invested in large data centers in Amsterdam and Singapore. That’s mostly for latency reasons but Arne also said customer “trust in region” is another driver. Other investments are going into UX and other enhancements to handle multiple languages, currencies in prep for the 60 country presence.

Arne used the word “trust” several times during the call. I asked him if that meant GoDaddy would need to change its “fun” image.  Fun yes, Racy no he said would be the changed branding. Also likely global, with Jean-Claude Van Damme as example of a recent pitchman.

I guess we will see that February 2 – GoDaddy has made a splash each year with its Super Bowl commercials. But no matter what GoDaddy is no longer going to be known as just the company with affordable web domains. 

Update - the SuperBowl commercial is available to preview. It's not racy, continues with Danica and focuses on the acquired Locu GetFound functionality