UPDATED 22:37 EDT / MARCH 08 2017

CLOUD

Rackspace brings its ‘Fanatical Support’ managed services to Google’s cloud

Rackspace Inc. is hoping to take cash in on the rising popularity of Google Inc.’s cloud by offering managed services for its enterprise customers.

The San Antonio-based firm will introduce its Fanatical Support offering for Google Cloud Platform later in the year, complementing its similar offerings for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure users. The move comes at a time when Rackspace is accelerating its transformation from a direct public cloud competitor of those companies to a partner, after a buyout took it private late last year. It also comes as Google aims to capture more cloud business from large enterprises that want more support.

Rackspace announced its new partnership Wednesday at Google’s annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco for software developers and partners. It said it would provide GCP customers with additional cloud infrastructure support, data migration expertises, onboarding and ongoing operational support for optimal cloud application performance.

“The strategic relationship with Google is an exciting launch that addresses a growing market need,” said Patrick Lee, general manager of the Google business at Rackspace. “The momentum around GCP is building, and as businesses move workloads to this platform, they’re looking for expertise and a support partner to help with that journey. By providing Fanatical Support for Google Cloud, we will be able to help deliver value to joint customers and help them meet their evolving business needs.”

Google’s share of the public cloud world remains significantly smaller than that of AWS and Microsoft Azure. The company launched its cloud back in 2011, making it later to the game than either of its rivals. But Google’s has been given a fresh impetus in the last year or so under the leadership of VMware Inc. co-founder Diane Greene, and showed off a number of new enterprise customers including HSBC, Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive, Home Depot, eBay Inc. and Walt Disney during its keynote speech at Cloud Next yesterday.

Meanwhile, data from 451 Research Inc. shows that multi-cloud adoption trends have helped Google’s cloud adoption rates to double in the past year. As such, Rackspace clearly feels there will be plenty of demand for its managed services offering.

“The partnership between Rackspace and Google is a natural fit,” said Michelle Bailey, chief research officer at 451 Research. “Both companies have strong technical capabilities and the pairing of Rackspace’s strong service culture with Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering practice is an important step forward in providing enterprise-ready customer support capabilities on the Google Cloud Platform. We continue to see rising adoption of GCP globally, so there is real value to Rackspace in being the first to market with this type of managed services partnership that seeks to bring cloud-native capabilities to traditional enterprise customers and business-critical applications.”

Rackspace’s managed cloud portfolio also covers OpenStack and a variety of VMware’s solutions.

The company earlier this year said it was laying off around 275 of its U.S.-based workforce in order to reduce operating expenses and tighten up its focus on its managed services business.

Image: Rackspace/Facebook

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