SkyKick offers a three-pronged cloud management solution which facilitates migration, backup and management, using a 100 per cent channel model. They recently extended the platform by adding the capacity for partners to offer a white-labelled syndicated version from their own websites.

TORONTO – Cloud management software vendor SkyKick is in attendance at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference here, articulating the value of their three-in-one Microsoft-focused solution. Their platform recently received a major extension, with the addition of the capability for partners to drop a white labelled version of SkyKick on their website, to allow customers to obtain it themselves.

“SkyKick is a 100 per cent partner-focused company, which addresses both the challenges and opportunities created for the channel by the cloud,” said Chike Farrell, the company’s Vice President of Marketing. “Partners are moving to the cloud, which is putting downward pressure on ways they make their money. But this also creates an opportunity in what we call cloud management – moving customers to the cloud, protecting them, and managing them. It’s the same things that the partners did on-prem, but in different ways.

“We have a suite of products that help them to do this,” Farrell added. “Migration, Backup and Management – we do all three, providing all of this in one solution.” The company’s initial focus was on migration, but the other aspects were soon internally developed.

“Our value proposition includes having all three of these elements,” said Evan Richman, one of SkyKick’s two co-CEOs. “Having one platform to do all these three things that customers need is very powerful. It helps our partners build a long-term cloud relationship with them.

Todd Schwartz, SkyKick’s other co-CEO, stressed that another key differentiator for them is their complete channel focus.

“We are the only 100 per cent partner company in this space,” he said. “Partners are central in this space. We build software that’s uniquely designed for partners. It has all the things they need to happen to move a company to the cloud, protect them, and manage them.”

SkyKick has a fairly large channel, with over 5000 partners globally.

“Some of them are companies with 50 customers and some have tens of thousands,” Richman said.

While SkyKick started out serving the SMB space, they have already begun to move upmarket.

“SMB is where we started, and now we are getting pulled up into the mid-market and enterprise,” Schwartz said. “Our sweet spot is really any customer under 2500 seats.”

The rise of Azure in the last year has assisted SkyKick because they are heavily focused on Microsoft and on Azure.

“We are focused on the Microsoft cloud and built on the Microsoft stack,” Schwartz said. “90 per cent of our focus is Microsoft cloud products. Our focus as a company is to help Microsoft cloud adoption, and our mission as a company is to help partners be successful in the cloud.”

Azure’s rise has helped SkyKick – and vice versa.

“We leverage Azure heavily,” Schwartz said. “Our entire cloud platform is built on it. It helps us be more agile. Our products in turn drive Azure consumption. We have partners who love to sell backup and we provide an easy way for them to consume it on Azure.”

The recent extension of their platform allows partners to use syndicated applications on their own websites. SkyKick’s white-label migration and backup applications can be embedded directly on the partner website in under an hour.

“This is the next evolution of our cloud management program,” Schwartz said. “The syndication product allows any partner to drop a white-labelled Skykick onto their website, so customers can self serve to obtain it themselves. It’s very simple to install, because it’s only ten lines of code.”

The syndicated version covers migration and backup – but not management. That’s something that partners need to provide directly.

In addition, SkyKick has opened up its APIs to enable any developer to build custom cloud management applications or to create deeper integrations within a partner’s system

“It’s a very robust set of APIs, which really opens up things for developers,” Richman said.

“These new elements continue our focus on partner profitability and recurring revenue that is infused across our entire system,” Farrell said. “This extension of our platform continues that path.”