It's official: GoDaddy launches operations in Australia

GoDaddy, the web hosting company, has officially launched its operations in Australia with the hope to make a mark among the small scale businesses. It has appointed Tara Commerford as its country manager for Australia and New Zealand.

Commerford has previously worked with LinkedIn Australia and Southeast Asia as the head of communications. She will be operating from Sydney and helping operations in Australia flow smoothly for GoDaddy. Commerford told reporters that by making its local presence felt, GoDaddy will be able to reach out to the SMEs, 90 percent of which has access to Internet but only half of the number has a website.

"It's a significantly underserved market, and we feel like there's a clear gap in the understanding between internet penetration and the value a digital investment can bring to small business," she said.

According to the ZDNet, the official expansion of the company has taken place after using Australia as one of its four-tier test beds. GoDaddy International Executive Vice President James Carroll said that the performance of the company’s services in Australia was a testament for how well it would perform if expanded internationally. Last year, GoDaddy expanded its operations to Latin America and some parts of Europe. It now operates in 17 languages across 37 countries. Carroll also said that plans are underway to enter the Asian and Middle Eastern markets next year.

Rajiv Sodhi, GoDaddy vice president for India and Australia, said that the company focuses on 3 pillar strategies: to increase awareness among the SMEs the ease of getting online, make the services relevant with the local market and provide 24/7 inbound and outbound processes to help customers.

According to Opptrends, GoDaddy runs call centres in U.S., Europe and Asia. The Arizona-based unit serves the Australian market. Until GoDaddy started supporting payments in Australian dollar, customers in Australia used to make payments in U.S. dollar.

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