SkyKick Extends Its Cloud Management Reach

After helping channel partners build a practice around migrating organizations to Microsoft Office 365, SkyKick is expanding its cloud management service to include support for other applications alongside a new backup and recovery service.

Fresh off raising another $10 million, Todd Schwartz, SkyKick co-founder and co-CEO, said that in addition to helping partners manage Microsoft Office 365, there is clearly demand for a management platform designed from the ground up to natively manage cloud applications as a service. The first cloud application that SkyKick will support beyond its traditional base of Microsoft applications is the Dropbox file-sharing and synchronization service.

“We’re about the cloud first and being the cloud only,” Schwartz said. “This is all about the next phase of our growth.

As part of that effort, SkyKick is also making available a backup and recovery service built from the ground up to support cloud applications. While there is no shortage of data protection services in the cloud, SkyKick has spent several years developing one designed to enable cloud applications to be restored via a single click, co-founder and CEO Evan Richman said.

Designed to support an unlimited amount of data, SkyKick claims that the backup and recovery service they provide only takes a minute to set up and requires no software to be installed.

To a significant degree, SkyKick is evolving into becoming a managed service provider platform for cloud applications. To that end, the company plans to spend a significant portion of the $10 million it has raised to develop and expand its channel programs, Schwartz said.

The degree to which SkyKick can entice channel partners to standardize on that cloud management platform naturally remains to be seen. However, given the fact that many of the other MSP platforms in use today were designed for another era, Richman said he likes the company’s chances of attracting a new generation of channel partners born of the cloud to the SkyKick platform.

Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.