Domain registration and web hosting giant Go Daddy has entered into a strategic partnership and investment deal (don’t call it an acquisition) with KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but several reports place the Go Daddy investment at around $2.25 billion. It’s especially noteworthy since Go Daddy’s investors singled out the company’s burgeoning cloud portfolio as the major reason for their interest.

In Go Daddy’s press release, the 14-year-old company bills itself as “the world’s largest on-ramp for cloud-based software and services,” with 9.3 million customers worldwide and 48 million domain names managed. Moreover, Go Daddy claims it has more than 50 different product lines, including hosted e-mail, e-commerce solutions and SSL certificates. And that’s not even mentioning Go Daddy’s new, in-testing Data Center on Demand IaaS platform.

In a prepared statement, Managing Director of Silver Lake Greg Mondre said:

“Go Daddy is powerfully positioned for future growth as it continues to innovate and add to its truly unique platform of cloud-based software and services. At the same time, we plan to maintain and augment all of the attributes that have made Go Daddy a clear market leader today, including world class customer support and competitive pricing for its 9.3 million customers.”

Reading between the lines, it sounds like Go Daddy is going to be making a major play to break out of its better-known consumer cloud services and into enterprise-grade SaaS and cloud infrastructure marketplaces. Stay tuned to TalkinCloud for more.

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