Kevin Jones (Rackspace Technology CEO)
After a year of acquisitions, an initial public offering and a global rebrand, Rackspace Technology is finally asserting itself as a competitive player on the multi-cloud scene.
Having released its Rackspace Elastic Engineering framework last month, the once-managed cloud computing vendor has now staked its claim on the rising professional services market, offering advisory and consulting to system provisioning and management.
Effectively telling customers: “It’s no longer enough to just be in the cloud”, the move marks Rackspace’s foray into supporting customers’ cloud-native projects using the Rackspace Elastic Engineering’s pod framework.
According to industry analyst firm Technology Business Research (TBR), the pivot stems from before Rackspace’s IPO last August, whereby the company underwent a major strategic realignment, shifting from its traditional but capital-intensive data-hosting model to build up its cloud professional services.
This, TBR senior analyst Catie Merill wrote in a blog post, has the potential to improve Rackspace Technology’s value-add with support for emerging technologies such as serverless functions, automation and infrastructure-as-code.
With long-standing partnerships with public cloud partnerships Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Rackspace is now effectively addressing the growing trend of customers adopting multiple cloud platforms to support specific workloads, according to TBR.
Alongside the Elastic Engineering framework, the company also released its Rackspace Services offering for VMware Cloud, giving it a firm leg-up into the managed cloud space.
According to TBR, this provides a new high-touch services framework designed to support enterprise clients at all layers of the cloud stack, from infrastructure management to application modernisation.
In addition, the vendor-neutral approach will suit customers that are working with more than one single public cloud provider and using a multi- or hybrid-cloud approach.
From a channel perspective, the move will also suit cloud service providers (CSPs), which are also looking to address multicloud management pain points, either with professional services or self-service solutions.
“TBR expects that the Rackspace Technology platform-neutral approach, combined with a customer-centric approach to cloud transformation, will help the company assert itself in the managed cloud space to increasingly capture more market share away from its technology to services-centric competitors,” added Merill.
