Go Daddy makes its first “business” acquisition

Go Daddy acquires Outright. More to come?

Go Daddy today announced the acquisition of Outright, a provider of online financial software for small businesses.

This is only the company’s third acquisition in its history, and the first one that involves bringing over people from the acquired business. (It’s previous acquisitions were a technology acquisition for a root certificate and taking over the RegisterFly customer database when that registrar lost its accreditation.)

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman told Domain Name Wire today that the two company have business goals that match up almost perfectly.

“We’re two companies maniacally focused on helping small businesses,” he explained.

Outright approaches small business from the accounting side while Go Daddy comes at it from the web presence side. When the two companies first began discussions, Adelman said they would frequently “finish each other’s sentences”.

Adelman said Outright will continue to be a separate product and customers will use the service as usual going forward.

The acquisition may be the first of many for the company. When Go Daddy took a large investment from KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures in December it said it it would use it to expand to new markets and make strategic acquisitions.

Although it’s just a coincidence, it’s interesting that Go Daddy’s first true acquisition is of a financial software company. Bob Parsons founded Go Daddy with the proceeds from selling his own financial software company to Intuit.

Companies such as Intuit and Deluxe have moved into Go Daddy’s turf in recent years. They’ve acquired numerous businesses with a goal of offering everything a small business needs, including Go Daddy’s bread and butter of web sites and domain names. I would consider Intuit one of Go Daddy’s biggest competitors, and now Go Daddy can compete on a bit of Intuit’s home turf as well.