SAN ANTONIO, TX—(Marketwired – July 13, 2015) – Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, today announced that it has expanded its service offering for its Microsoft product portfolio with Fanatical Support® for Microsoft® Azureâ„¢. Rackspace will work with customers to help them speed their deployment of Azure, minimize costs and optimize performance. Rackspace engineers will provide application and infrastructure architecture guidance, making it easy for customers to succeed with Azure. The company will also offer hybrid cloud solutions that combine Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Microsoft's Cloud Platform and Azure.
“Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world's best expertise and service for industry–leading technologies — including a broad selection of Microsoft products,” said Taylor Rhodes, CEO at Rackspace. “We're pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure. By adding support for Azure to our portfolio, we can now serve customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure Stack.”
Rackspace is building on a 13–year collaboration with Microsoft by offering specialized expertise and its highly–regarded Fanatical Support for Azure. As a five–time Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year, Rackspace has a track record of providing managed cloud services on leading Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Cloud Platform with Hyper–V, System Center 2012 R2 (full suite), System Center Operations Manager 2007, SQL Server (2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, and 2014), Exchange, SharePoint and Office365, which is now generally available in the U.S.
“Fanatical Support for Azure and Azure Stack adds Rackspace's industry–leading support to Microsoft's deep experience with the hybrid cloud, creating a win–win for customers,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft's Cloud + Enterprise group. “With this relationship, our mutual customers will have even more options for migrating their diverse IT workloads to the cloud.”
Rackspace will work with customers to understand their requirements and create solutions that incorporate and maximize the latest Azure technologies. The Fanatical Support for Azure offering includes:
Microsoft Specialized Expertise: Rackspace is a five–time Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year, with hundreds of Microsoft certified professionals managing thousands of Microsoft servers and workloads, more than 500,000 seats of Microsoft Exchange and more than 85 percent of the world's hosted SharePoint licenses.
Managed Support: Managed services and expertise available 24x7x365 from Microsoft certified professionals at Rackspace. This allows customers to offload the management of their environments and focus on their core business.
Architectural Guidance: Rackspace will help customers architect their applications and optimize databases to run at cloud scale, making use of best practice designs.
Proactive Monitoring: Rackspace monitors customers' environments with a mix of monitoring tools to proactively address system issues. Rackspace engineers can then help optimize performance, stability and address security issues.
Hybrid Ready: Rackspace can help customers build applications that span on premise IT resources, Azure and the Rackspace Private Cloud powered by the Microsoft Cloud Platform, combining the benefits of physically isolated resources and elastic compute.
Database Support: Rackspace database specialists are available as an on–demand service for SQL Server Instances as well as customers' SQL databases running on Azure Virtual Machines. These specialists have experience managing over 30,000 SQL Server Instances.
Purchasing Options
Customers will be able to take advantage of Fanatical Support for Azure in two ways:
Fanatical Support with Azure Bundle (Infrastructure and Support):Customers can purchase Azure infrastructure and support as a bundle from Rackspace, whose experts can help them with architectural and on–boarding guidance.
Fanatical Support for Azure (Support Only): Customers who already use Azure infrastructure and want support and management expertise can get Rackspace managed services for their infrastructure as a separate cost based on their infrastructure spend.
“As organizations increasingly incorporate cloud services as part of their overall IT portfolio, the reality for many is that it introduces complexity into their environment,” said Michelle Bailey, SVP of Datacenter Initiatives at 451 Research. “Cloud providers offering deep expertise around planning, migrating and managing enterprise–class production workloads is a massive gap in the market right now. With Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure, Rackspace is responding to the needs of their customers looking for a trusted advisor to help ease the transition to cloud and derive maximum benefit from their investments.”
At launch, the offering will be generally available for U.S. based customers and will expand to International customers through early 2016. For more information on the Microsoft product portfolio at Rackspace and the recent addition of Fanatical Support for Azure, please visit: www.rackspace.com/azure.
About Rackspace
Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the challenge and expense of managing complex IT infrastructure and application platforms on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise on top of leading technologies developed by OpenStack, Microsoft, VMware and others, through a results–obsessed service known as Fanatical Support®. The company has more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including two–thirds of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud–Enabled Managed Hosting, and has been honored as one of Fortune's Best Companies to Work For in six of the past eight years. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.
Forward–Looking Statement
This press release contains forward–looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward–looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical facts are statements that could be deemed forward–looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with the Fanatical Support for Azure services; anticipated operational and financial benefits from the Fanatical Support for Azure services; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from the Fanatical Support for Azure services may not materialize because this product and services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the product and services cost effectively, differentiate the product and services from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the product and services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the product's benefit, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the product; and (vi) other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10–Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2015, filed with the SEC on May 11, 2015. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward–looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward–looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.