Cloud computing company Rackspace Inc. is stepping up its managed services offerings for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud.

The company, which in recent years has transitioned from being a competitor of the cloud giant to a partner in its capacity as a professional services provider, today announced a new managed database service for AWS. The service covers the Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue and Amazon Athena databases.

The new service is aimed at helping customers quickly and easily prepare, load and query data sets while lowering operational costs and reducing time to market. Under the service, Rackspace will also help customers to architect, integrate and optimize their information technology systems with Amazon’s relational database management system, data warehouse and serverless computing offerings.

Rackspace was once considered to be one of AWS’ main rivals in the public cloud computing space, but a few years ago the company conceded that it lacked the infrastructure and resources to go toe-to-toe with Amazon. As a result, Rackspace has reinvented itself by carving out a niche as a provider of managed services for AWS and its competitors, including Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC.

Enterprise customers need these kinds of managed services because many of them lack the skills and know how to manage, operate and maintain cloud databases for their next-generation application workloads, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

“As enterprises move automation to the cloud, traditional database information also needs to be available there,” Mueller said. “Enter the always crafty Rackspace with a new services offering.”

Rackspace said the new Managed Database Services offering is available from today in all AWS regions.

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