SkyKick Office 365 Migration Suite Now Free for Microsoft IUR Partners

Looking to leverage Microsoft (MSFT) Office 365? Microsoft and SkyKick are working together to ensure additional Microsoft partners can use Office 365 for free.

SkyKick this week announced its Office 365 Migration Suite is now available at no cost within the Microsoft Internal Use Rights (IUR) program, enabling Microsoft partners with up to 500 seats to migrate their own business to Office 365 for free using SkyKick technology.

Business Insider pointed out that the Microsoft-SkyKick partnership illustrates Microsoft’s plan to compete with Google Apps via “dogfooding,” aka using its own technology to gain a competitive advantage.

Microsoft partners can use the Microsoft products they sell for free; meanwhile, SkyKick said its SMB and Enterprise Migration Suites “help partners automate and manage an entire Office 365 migration project for IT solution providers.”

“By giving hundreds of thousands of Microsoft partners an easy, quick and free way to migrate their business to Office 365, SkyKick’s Migration Suite through IUR helps partners experience the full power of Office 365,” SkyKick co-CEO Todd Schwartz told MSPmentor.

Gavriella Schuster, general manager of Microsoft’s worldwide partner group, said partners that take advantage of IURs and use Office 365 for their own businesses “are three times more successful at selling it.”

Eligible partners can take advantage of the SkyKick IUR benefit until the end of June. The benefit is available to all Microsoft Action Pack partners and Silver and Gold competency partners.

Microsoft’s commercial cloud revenue rose 114 percent in the fiscal 2015 second quarter.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, attributed part of his company’s success in FY15 Q2 to its Office 365 service: “Office 365 now includes new application experiences on all phones and tablets for mobile productivity … [and] we continue to invest in enterprise value by integrating mobile device management (MDM) and the Enterprise Mobility Suite into Office 365.”

In addition, Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers exceeded 9.2 million in FY15 Q2, up 30 percent sequentially over the previous quarter.

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