GoDaddy is now a Hosted PBX Provider

Last week, GoDaddy jumped into the business voice space with the acquisition of FreedomVoice for $42 Million in cash (and up to $5 Million in additional milestone payments).

According to Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer, GoDaddy. “FreedomVoice is a natural fit with GoDaddy as we both share a common goal: to harness the power of the cloud to deliver products that fit the specific needs of small businesses, coupled with customized, empathetic customer care.”

“At FreedomVoice our mission has always been to help companies start, run and grow, and we’re ecstatic to join GoDaddy who is just as passionate about helping small businesses succeed,” said FreedomVoice CEO Eric Thomas. “There is great synergy between our companies and our team can’t wait to get started on delivering the next generation of voice to small businesses around the world.”

The press release states that GoDaddy has 14 Million business customers.   Doing some quick back of the envelope calculations, if they were somehow able to convert 10% of their existing customer base to voice customers, they could conceivably achieve the same scale as Ring Central ($299 Million revenue) or 8×8 ($206 Million revenue).

I am sure that is the plan.  But then, we all know that onboarding SMBs is not a task that lends itself to cookie cutter service (which runs deep in GoDaddy’s DNA from my own experience).   It will be  interesting to see how this pans out.