Rackspace Inc. Chief Executive Officer Taylor Rhodes said Wednesday he’s leaving the company after three years at the helm.

Rhodes (pictured) led the company through a strategic transformation that saw it focus on providing managed services for public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure after giving up on its ambitions to compete with them.

Rhodes’ vacant seat will be filled by Rackspace President Jeff Cotten on an interim basis, though the move could well become permanent. The company’s board noted that he’s a “strong candidate” to land the job full-time.

Rhodes said in a blog post that he felt he had taken the company as far as his skill set could take it, and that it needed someone with different abilities and knowledge to take it further. However, Rhodes won’t be resting on his laurels, for he has already taken on a CEO role at a smaller, unnamed cloud computing company.

“It’s using cloud technologies to disrupt what has been a very low-tech industry,” he explained in his post. “The company is going through growing pains and needs a CEO who has been through those challenges before.”

Rackspace hired Rhodes as its CEO back in 2014, taking over for co-founder and former CEO Graham Weston. That happened at a time when Rackspace’s public cloud ambitions were on the rocks, the company was losing money and had already declined several buyout and partnership offers.

Under Rhodes’ leadership, the company transformed itself into a managed services specialist, famous for its “fanatical support” on major public cloud platforms. Rhodes also negotiated Rackspace’s sale to private equity investment firm Apollo Global Management for $4.3 billion.

“I’m proud to have led Rackspace through a hinge in its history, as we seized the leadership of the young and fast-growing market for managed cloud services, and as we went private under the ownership of Apollo Global Management and its partners,” Rhodes said of his performance at the helm. “We recently reported strong fourth-quarter results to our bond and debt holders. And 2017 is shaping up to be even stronger, as we’re exceeding almost all of the financial targets we established with Apollo and our board.”

Cotten followed up with a blog post of his own. He said the company was now in a “solid condition,” and its managed cloud business was growing “exceptionally well.” He claimed that the company’s managed AWS and Microsoft Azure services had grown more than 1,400 percent year-over-year since launching two years ago, though that’s clearly from a small base. The company also recently announced plans to provide managed service offerings for Google Cloud Platform later this year.

Rackspace will also open a new data center in Germany in the near future, Cotten said. The new facility adds to Rackspace’s existing data centers in Chicago, Dallas, North Virgina, London, Hong Kong and Sydney.

Image: Rackspace