How GoDaddy is growing into a SaaS company

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Web-hosting giant GoDaddy is trying to grow into a products company to help its small business customers move into the modern computing era rather than just hosting their websites. A conversion to mobile websites is first, but cloud services are on the horizon.

GoDaddy, the web-hosting and domain-name giant — and erstwhile cloud computing provider — has a plan to bring both itself and millions of its small-business customers into the 21st century. News on Thursday that the company is getting into the mobile website space is just the beginning of the company’s plan to become a product company — something like Intuit for the front office. But GoDaddy will be leaving the desktop behind…

New head of products and technology Jason Rosenthal told me GoDaddy is trying to evolve from being just a marketing and support company. It wants to grow a third leg focused on products and technology, and it thinks mobile is the perfect delivery vehicle for those aspirations. Rosenthal has spearheaded major strategic efforts before, including at his previous gig as Ning.com CEO, where he got rid of the social-network-creation company’s freemium business just a month into his tenure…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-godaddy-is-growing-into-a-saas-company/