Cloud services provider Rackspace Inc. is teaming up with Google Inc. and Pivotal Software Inc. in two separate partnerships aimed at delivering new multicloud capabilities.

With regard to Pivotal, Rackspace said Tuesday it now supports the company’s Cloud Foundry application development platform that’s designed to run on both public and private clouds or dedicated hardware. The move reflects a growing trend among enterprises toward multicloud and cloud-native setups as they focus more on application deployment, the company said.

Under the partnership, Rackspace will help customers to manage their multicloud deployments on Cloud Foundry. The intention is to help customers quickly deploy the platform so “in-house teams can focus on innovation and getting out to market quickly while Rackspace handles the backend,” Rackspace said. The company said the managed service should appeal to enterprises that want their DevOps teams, those that combine software developers and information technology operations staff to focus on application development instead of worrying about managing infrastructure.

The deal illustrates how Rackspace is attempting to “move up the stack” to manage cloud platforms, said Brannon Lacey, the company’s vice president of applications and platforms.

Rackspace said its managed services offering for Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available now in all Rackspace regions.

Cozying up to Google

Also this week, Rackspace said it’s now beta testing Google Cloud Platform managed services, ahead of general availability later this year.

“The goal of managed GCP is to enable Rackspace customers to experience the best reliability, security, scalability and availability possible on Google Cloud Platform,” Rackspace Vice President of Google Cloud Patrick Lee wrote in a blog post.

The move is part of Rackspace’s new strategy to specialize in managed cloud services for all of the major public cloud platforms. The company already offers the same kind of support and services for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and hopes to make its Google offering generally available this fall.

Lee said the decision to support Google’s cloud was made in part because of customer demand. He wrote that customers are increasingly asking the company to support workloads on the platform of their choice.

In addition to the cloud services offering, Rackspace has also been chosen by Google as a managed services partner to provide customer reliability engineering support. What this means is that Rackspace will ensure that Google cloud customers’ applications run at the same speed and with the same reliability found in Google’s own apps. Previously these tasks were handled exclusively by Google’s own engineers.

The new customer reliability engineering partnership is expected to go live by the end of this year, Lee said.

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