GoDaddy’s chief technology officer — amid a time when the company is expanding its cloud-computing operations — is departing, according to a regulatory filing.
Elissa Murphy will be leaving the company later in May. Her departure comes as GoDaddy has begun building out cloud infrastructure, helping it evolve from a simple hosting service to something more robust. These kinds of tools help convince small businesses to stick around with GoDaddy services, rather than just register and host a domain.
To be sure, executive departures happen — especially as companies grow and go public. But it’s still an interesting time for her to leave given the company’s expansion into cloud services.
According to a statement provided to Fortune, Murphy is joining Google. Chief information and infrastructure officer Arne Josefberg will take over, according to Fortune — giving him a pretty important job for the recently-public company that has to find ways to expand its core business. There are no hints as to what she’ll be doing at Google, but Google too has been winning big clients for its cloud service, including recently Spotify.
GoDaddy has had somewhat of a rocky year, share-wise. But so far, on the year shares are up around 20% — signaling that, whatever the company is doing, it seems to be working and growing. Revenue for the company was up 14% in the fourth quarter year-over-year, and last quarter beat analyst expectations.
Still, if the company is going to continue growing, it has to find new lines of business — which means expanding into new areas that give small businesses tools that make them want to stick with GoDaddy, rather than moving to other services.
