The past few years has seen Rackspace Inc. pivot from competing with Amazon Web Services Inc. and the other major cloud players to actively partnering with them in the capacity of a professional services provider. The company now hopes to grow its role in the cloud ecosystem via a new acquisition.

Rackspace on Thursday announced that it has bought RelationEdge LLC, a consulting startup focused on helping organizations set up and operate Salesforce.com deployments.

Alongside its market-leading customer relationship management platform, Salesforce.com Inc. offers a vast array of other services that cover areas as diverse as marketing and technical support. Cobbling them together into a customized deployment aligned with a company’s needs can be a major undertaking. RelationEdge, which is based in San Diego, takes care of the heavy lifting for its clients.

The consultancy can also lend a hand with maintaining a Salesforce deployment after the initial setup and provides a set of online marketing services for enterprises. Since launching in 2013, RelationEdge’s operation has grown to 125 employees spread out over a dozen cities.

Bringing the startup’s talent into the fray should put Rackspace in a better position to address the lucrative software-as-a-service market. International Data Corp. projects that SaaS will account for nearly two-thirds of global cloud spending this year, with applications such as Salesforce’s CRM service alone representing over half the $160 billion worldwide total.

Rackspace’s ambitions extend to traditional software as well. The acquisition of RelationEdge comes about a year after it picked up TriCore Solutions Inc., a company that specialized in managing deployments of SAP SE and Oracle Corp. applications.

Rackspace didn’t share the financial terms of either deal. However, it said RelationEdge is set to continue operating under the current brand and leadership team with “considerable independence.”

Image: Garrett Heath