Seattle-based SkyKick on Tuesday unveiled a new category of cloud-management products designed to help channel partners manage their customers’ cloud-based applications from a single platform.

Partners now can back up and centrally manage cloud data and services for Microsoft Office 365 and Dropbox. Combined with SkyKick’s Migration Suites that have been used to move tens of thousands of businesses to Office 365, the company says IT providers now have a more powerful platform to grow their cloud customer base and more efficiently move their customers to the cloud.

“Cloud usage is expected to double in the next three years, and the average IT partner will soon have over 5,000 customer cloud touch points to administer, which can be incredibly complex and time-consuming for solution providers to backup and manage,” said Todd Schwartz, SkyKick co-founder and co-CEO. “With the release of our new cloud-management products, it’s another step forward for us in delivering innovative products to help partners around the world provide a more successful, efficient and safe cloud experience for their customers on one unified platform.”

The release coincides with SkyKick securing $10 million more in financing, bringing its total capital raised to $17.2 million. The company is using the money to speed up product development, and expand sales and marketing to support demand.

“With today’s strategic investment, we are accelerating SkyKick’s growth trajectory to help them solve a multibillion-dollar opportunity, giving IT partners one platform to manage businesses’ entire cloud presence,” said Navin Thukkaram, Owiki COO, and a key Skykick investor.

SMB Group research shows that the typical company uses three cloud applications, and the management of cloud applications takes three hours per employee per year on average. Since a typical IT partner manages 1,000 employees across their customer base, this represents 3,000 hours of cloud management cost per partner annually, or more than 1 billion hours of cloud management activity every year.

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