Rackspace hosts over 3 million daily transactions with Vodafone M-PESA

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:38:55 GMT

Rackspace Hosting, the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, has announced that it has been chosen by Vodafone to host and support the M-PESA platform.

M-PESA is a platform designed to provide a fast, safe and easy way to transfer money from person to person and is a valuable service in emerging economies where there is little or no existing banking infrastructure outside the major cities. It is now available in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Afghanistan and Fiji and boasts over 16 million customers.

Neil Dwyer, Vodafone's senior operations manager said: "Rackspace has a long history of being able to meet demand quickly and we are delighted to work with them in order to deliver this important and increasingly popular service. It is essential for us to work with a hosting company that can provide 24/7 support and comprehensive security. Rackspace has proven their ability to deliver and their rapid response times allow us to scale quickly and effectively to meet peaks in demand."

Vodafone has recently announced plans to introduce M-PESA to other countries where the traditional banking infrastructure is low and mobile phone penetration is high.

Rackspace managing director David Kelly commented: "We're excited to be working with Vodafone on this project and look forward to seeing how it develops across the world to support those people who currently do not have access to banks and in turn help them to become more economically active through the application of innovative technology."

As part of the deal, Rackspace utilises satellite streaming technology to send and receive real time transaction data using clustered database servers. It also provides managed back-up and dedicated server hosting of all application and web servers.

- ENDS -

About Rackspace Hosting UK:
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in hosting, virtualisation and cloud computing and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.

About Vodafone
Vodafone is one of the world's largest mobile communications companies by revenue with approximately 347 million proportionate customers as at 30 June 2010. Vodafone currently has equity interests in over 30 countries across five continents and over 40 partner networks worldwide.

Rackspace Hosting announces general availability of Cloud Servers for Windows

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:35:00 GMT

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the world's leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing, has announced the general availability of its Cloud Servers for Windows offering. The new service delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing applications and supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next social networking phenomenon.

Designed for small to medium businesses, .NET developers, system administrators, IT Pros, and current Rackspace customers, Cloud Servers for Windows features include:
- Custom configurations with full administrator access
- Ability to upgrade server size on-demand
- Add or delete servers on the fly
- Rescue mode
- Management via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel and the Cloud Servers API
- Ability to add additional IP addresses
- Pay only for what you use with a utility payment model with hourly billing; no contracts or upfront costs
- Backups and Snapshots to Cloud Files™ (coming soon)
- Enterprise-class SLAs
- Support for a broad array of the latest Microsoft Windows Server Images including: Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit; Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit; Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 32-bit; Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 Enterprise Edition 32-bit

"Microsoft is committed to delivering a broad set of enterprise-ready products and services that build on the existing capabilities and skill sets of service providers like Rackspace," said John Zanni, general manager of Worldwide Hosting for the Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. "As a long time partner of one of the industry’s top cloud hosting providers, we are excited that Rackspace's Cloud Servers for Windows offering has exited beta and is now available to the thousands of businesses that have built their infrastructure around Microsoft Windows and Microsoft .NET technologies."

SpaBooker, a SaaS scheduling and point-of-sale (POS) application specifically designed for the spa, salon and wellness industry, utilizes Rackspace's hybrid solution by using managed dedicated servers in addition to their cloud computing solution, Cloud Servers for Windows. Daniel Lizio-Katzen, SpaBooker Managing Director, states: "When we set out to look for a cloud computing solution, we didn't hesitate to look at Rackspace Cloud first as we've been very pleased with the high level of support received from their managed dedicated servers. Rackspace Cloud Servers has been the ideal solution to separate our actual application from our public facing website. We currently have our entire staging environment running on the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta and the overall ease of use has been phenomenal. The cost savings compared to traditional dedicated hosting are also substantial."

"We're constantly looking for ways to increase the flexibility and choice customers can find with Rackspace Hosting After several months of successful beta testing with hundreds of customers, we’re excited to remove the beta label and offer Cloud Servers for Windows to the market," said Pat Matthews, VP and GM of Cloud Hosting, Rackspace. "We believe this product will be attractive to new Rackspace customers as well as those we are already serving."

The service provides a full suite of features supported by the industry’s leading Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Rackspace’s hallmark customer service, Fanatical Support. Pricing currently begins at $0.08 an hour for 1GB RAM and 40GB disk.

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace announces plans to collaborate with NASA on OpenStack project

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:14:51 GMT

Rackspace Hosting has announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud hosting industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

"Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand," said Chris Kemp, NASA's Chief Technology Officer for IT. "To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source."

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files. The next component planned for release later this year is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. Using these components, organisations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

"We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies," said Lew Moorman, president, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. "We are proud to have NASA's support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres."

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. Rackspace recently hosted an OpenStack Design Summit where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

"OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability," said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems. "As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products."

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support ' to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including dedicated Hosting UK provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Dedicated Hosting, cloud hosting and data centre facilities .

Rackspace Hosting Updates Rackspace Hybrid Email for 1.7 Million Users

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:07:57 GMT

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the world leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, has enhanced its popular Rackspace Hybrid Email offering - a custom mix of Hosted Microsoft Exchange and the business-focused Rackspace Email platform on a single domain. Rackspace Hybrid Email now features easy calendar viewing between Hosted Microsoft Exchange and Rackspace Email, as well as a faster webmail design for Rackspace Email to make businesses using Rackspace Hybrid Email even more productive.

"We've learned from our customers that, on average, only a small percentage of employees really need and use the advanced features of Microsoft Exchange, yet many businesses are paying a lot more to run Exchange for every single user," said Kirk Averett, director of product for cloud applications at Rackspace. "With Rackspace Hybrid Email, companies can purchase a combination of Exchange and low cost Rackspace Email accounts on a single domain, without sacrificing features for any employee. Most businesses can realise a significant cost savings by utilising this model because they have different types of email users."

Rackspace Hybrid Email has been a key attraction for Rackspace solution partners and resellers because it provides another unique selling point, in addition to Rackspace's Fanatical Support. Businesses can reduce total costs by substituting even one Exchange user with Rackspace Email. For example, using an average 80/20 ratio of Rackspace Email to Hosted Exchange, businesses can save more than 60 percent on email with Rackspace Hybrid Email compared to Hosted Exchange alone, and significantly more than hosting their own email in-house.

With the recent updates, Rackspace Hybrid Email now features:

- Viewable Calendars - Now users can share and view calendars across the entire organisation, whether it's an Exchange user or a Rackspace Email user, for easier scheduling and coordination.
- Improved Webmail - The new webmail interface for Rackspace Email is easy to learn and faster to navigate. New features include improved search quality and speed, and simplified customisation of company logos and background images for private label resellers.
- Simple Control Panel - Administrators can easily manage Hosted Exchange and Rackspace Email accounts and settings from one dashboard.
- Microsoft SharePoint - All Rackspace cloud email accounts have access to free hosted SharePoint, with up to 250MB of storage, for improved document management and team collaboration. More storage is easily purchased with low utility pricing.
- Compatibility - Both Hosted Exchange and Rackspace Email are compatible with the Microsoft Outlook desktop client, and provide mobile support for Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Mobile.

About Rackspace Hosting UK
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including dedicated servers, managed hosting, cloud hosting and email and apps.

Rackspace data centres offer a full suite of cloud computing applications including email, collaboration and storage solutions. Rackspace hosts more than 1.7 million paid email accounts through its email platform that includes Rackspace Email, Hosted Microsoft Excha

Rackspace named in the Financial Times UK’s 50 Best Workplaces

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:48:21 GMT

Rackspace Hosting, the world's leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, has announced that it has been placed 18th on the Financial Times UK's 50 Best Workplaces ranking for 2010.

The award recognises Rackspace for creating one of the best places to work in the UK for six consecutive years. Rackspace was also listed in "The Best Workplaces For Generation Y" category which quizzed under-25s on whether they would advocate Rackspace as a 'great place to work'.

Brian Thomson, Managing Director at Rackspace EMEA, commented: "We are so pleased to be honoured for creating a winning workplace for the sixth year in a year. Success in the global Best Workplaces Programme is a greater achievement than ever with over 1.5 million employees taking part in the survey across 45 nations worldwide. We believe that our employees, known as Rackers, make the difference and we are extremely committed to making investments in our people and striving to ensure they feel valued."

The FT's Best Workplaces Programme is run by the Great Place to Work Institute UK, which has been formed to recognise excellence in people management. According to the institute: 'A great place to work is one where employees trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do and enjoy the people with whom they work.'

"2010 is shaping up to be a tremendous year," continued Thomson."We've been listed in not only the FT Great Places to Work list, but also as one of the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies. We're always looking for ways to keep making Rackspace a great place to work, and we'll keep listening to our Rackers and thinking of ways to reinforce our commitment to them."

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including dedicated servers, Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, virtualisation and data centre facilities.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected industry trends, operational and financial results and growth plans and expectations; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements or assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include infrastructure failures, the continuation or further deterioration of the current difficult economic conditions or further fluctuations, disruptions, instability or downturns in the economy, the effectiveness of managing company growth, technological and competitive factors, regulatory factors, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2010 filed on May 6, 2010. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking stateme

Rackspace Named IT Operator of the Year at the Green IT Awards

Thu, 27 May 2010 10:58:24 GMT

Rackspace, the world's leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry has been announced as the winner of the coveted title of IT Operator of the Year in the prestigious Green IT Awards.

"We're absolutely thrilled to be recognised as IT Operator of the Year by The Green IT Awards," said Rackspace Managing Director Brian Thomson. "We've worked hard not only to make our customer offering sustainable, but also introduce internal initiatives such as employee education and recycling. We're also very proud of our energy efficiency technology in our Slough data centre that uses energy efficient measures including dual-core AMD Opteron processors and ambient cooling technology. We plan to continue to introduce even more initiatives over the coming years and work harder than ever to be green."

Over 75 organisations were nominated for The Green IT Awards and winners were selected by readers of the Green IT magazine and its website. The Green IT Awards are a benchmark by which IT companies are measured for environmental performance. The awards also showcase the role played by green marketing and sustainability communications in informing people about green issues, products and lifestyle choices, and provide examples of excellence and best practice in communicating sustainability and green issues.

Rackspace's overall 'green' activity is designed to support its commitment to contributing towards the larger environmental solution. The company believes that "green" activity makes business sense as well as environmental sense. Rackspace has adopted several initiatives over the past two years to help reduce its environmental impact:

- The Slough data centre (DC), designed to use energy efficient technology, provides 55,000 square foot of net technical space, and has been built to help ensure efficient use of energy. Cooling is a key element of energy use in all data centres and Rackspace has deployed ambient cooling technology
- Through International Tree Foundation (ITF), Rackspace has agreed to have a tree planted for every new customer, as a way to mitigate some of the carbon generated through its hosting solutions.
- Internal initiatives promoting the use of paper from sustainable sources, recycling of aluminium cans, paper, cardboard and plastic, and the use of environmentally friendly cleaning products.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry and has been ranked in the Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including managed, green hosting, dedicated servers and Cloud Computing.

Rackspace urges UK businesses to update legacy IT to stay ahead

Tue, 11 May 2010 09:48:22 GMT

Rackspace, the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing, has released the findings of its latest commissioned research which indicates that UK businesses may be missing opportunities around new approaches to technology and continuing to over-invest in legacy IT.

The research, surveying over 400 IT decision makers, including 218 from the UK, revealed that 93% of the UK companies surveyed do not believe that they have a cutting-edge approach to adopting new technology.

The survey also highlighted that less than a third (28%) believe they are 'early adopters' of new technology approaches, such as on-demand computing, which may indicate a need for better education on the benefits of moving to new IT systems. This finding is reinforced by Forrester's report* that around half of IT software budgets are spent on maintaining or upgrading old solutions. Therefore, it appears that companies are not investigating how new technologies can support and evolve their business.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Rackspace Managing Director commented: "Organisations are under intense pressure to innovate, but the majority simply don't have enough time to do this. IT staff seem to be tearing their hair out, with almost half (48%) of the (UK) survey respondents keen to get involved in more proactive, strategic initiatives, but UK respondents indicated that less than a third (27%) of their IT team's time is spent on them. However, we are starting to see an evolution in the way IT is managed for everything from servers to social media, with many organisations looking to external experts to free up time that will enable them to focus on developing the business.

"Our business is a good example of this evolution in outsourcing servers, where we deployed more than 2,000 servers in the last three months of 2009, taking the total number of servers we manage to almost 57,000."

When considering server solutions, respondents stated reliability (78%) and utilisation (76%) as the most important, indicating that uptime and efficiency are top of today's server management needs.

Almost half of the UK IT decision makers (41%) stated a lack of knowledge or experience as the biggest concern when calling IT supplier helplines, followed by time taken to access support (36%) a lack of overnight assistance (36%), and rude, unhelpful staff (30%). This indicates a real need for IT organisations to review the level of support they are providing, which can help to avoid customer churn.

Brian Thomson concluded: "These findings indicate to us that organisations are being hindered by in-house IT systems and that there is a real need to focus on strategic initiatives to help the business. We believe this means a new approach to technology is on the horizon as organisations look to hosting, cloud computing and SaaS to power corporate computing and boost competitive edge."

-ENDS -

Notes to editors

* As reported by itpro.com.uk on February 18, 2010

About the Survey:
Rackspace's survey research was conducted in October through online surveys. It involved 441 US and UK-based IT decision-makers at companies with 100-500 employees. Detailed information, methodology and the full survey report is available on the Rackspace website.

About Rackspace Hosting:
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support (R) by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including Hosting UK has, for the third year running, been featured in the top tier of the Sunday Times Best Employer Awards. The Awards, which are based on employee interviews, indicate that Rackspace has created a fun and caring environment that helps nurture and grow individual talent.

The Sunday Times noted that 89 percent of Rackspace employees who responded to the survey were excited about where the company is going, with 79 percent saying their work is great for their personal growth and 95 per cent stating that they are proud to work for the organisation.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace, commented: “We are very proud of all the progress we have made in our business over the last year and what is truly pleasing is that as the company has grown our ‘Rackers’ continue to feel valued in their roles.

“We are thrilled to see that our employees love what they do and are excited at where the business is going. Our continued success is without doubt because of our Racker’s tireless dedication to Fanatical Support and the passion they show every single day.”

Rackspace is one of the UK’s most successful and fastest growing providers of IT hosting services. It has consistently been recognised for its excellence as an IT employer, with a number of accolades, most recently being one of only14 companies to receive a Laureate award from the Financial Times for being one of the best places to work in the UK and Europe 2009.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services with Managed Hosting including dedicated servers, Cloud Hosting and even private cloud for increased security and support, as well as Email and Apps.

Rackspace Puts Microsoft SharePoint in the Cloud

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:25:06 GMT

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world's leader in hosting, has announced the launch of hosted Microsoft SharePoint, the popular collaboration and file sharing platform, uniquely backed by Rackspace's 24x7x365 Fanatical Support. With the addition of hosted Microsoft SharePoint, Rackspace's suite of cloud applications now includes business-class collaboration, email and storage solutions.

"With SharePoint, Rackspace is offering businesses the most powerful file sharing and collaboration software on the market today," said Pat Matthews, General Manager of Rackspace Email & Apps. "With our cloud delivery model, businesses can take advantage of all the power Microsoft SharePoint has to offer without the hassle of having to manage the software in-house. Microsoft SharePoint backed by Fanatical Support is the recipe our customers have been asking for."

The Rackspace offering includes an intuitive control panel that allows administrators to quickly initiate SharePoint, add/remove users, and create SharePoint sites with only a few steps. The control panel also gives administrators the ability to manage Rackspace Email & Apps' full suite of applications, including hosted Microsoft Exchange, Rackspace Email, Email Archiving, and Rackspace Cloud Drive and Server Backup, in one dashboard.

With SharePoint from Rackspace, employees can become better equipped to collaborate on projects and share ideas across the organisation, with a centralized place to store, organise, and access documents.

Specific features and benefits include:
Collaboration and Social Computing - Allows teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information through the use of wikis and blogs.
Document Management - Organise files and share with team members in one central location.
Team Organisation - Easily customizable for different teams with workflows that fit specific projects. Automatic alerts keep team members up to date.
Microsoft Office Integration - Smoothly integrate with Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Enterprise Search - Quickly and easily find people, expertise, and content within organisations.

In addition to the new hosted SharePoint offering, Rackspace continues to offer Dedicated SharePoint through its managed services division for customers who require higher levels of customization or control. Dedicated SharePoint is a single tenant solution, supported by a team of certified Rackspace SharePoint engineers who design, deploy, customize and fully manage the solution.

Notes to editors:

About Rackspace Email & Apps
Rackspace Email & Apps, the rapidly growing software-as-a-service division of Rackspace Hosting, offers a full suite of hosted email, collaboration, and storage solutions. The Email & Apps division hosts more than 1.6 million paid email accounts through its proprietary web-based platform, Rackspace Email, Microsoft's Hosted Exchange, and a hybrid offering of the two services all backed by Rackspace's 24x7 Fanatical Support. In 2009, the Email & Apps division processed more than 30 billion emails and blocked more than 17 billion pieces of spam and 500 million viruses.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing and has been ranked in the Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, hosting solutions, including multiple server configurations, and has helped maintain customer retention and the Fanatical Support promise.

Thomson concluded: "2009 has been a great year for recognition of Rackspace's commitment to customers and employees as it has been named as a top 10 company for customer focus in Europe, voted 15th best company to work for by the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies Awards and presented with a Financial Times Laureate Award for being one of the Best Places to Work in the UK for five years running."

About Rackspace Hosting:
Rackspace Hosting UK is the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing and has been ranked in the Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including Green Hosting, Dedicated Servers, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting, Email and Apps.

Rackspace received the award for Customer Focus in the National Business Awards in November 2008 and has been nominated for the customer service excellence awards for four consecutive years, winning its category for the past three years. Rackspace was also named by Microsoft as the winner of the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year in the annual Microsoft Certified Partner Awards 2007. The Partner of the Year Award in Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions, recognises the top Microsoft partner delivering market-leading, Microsoft-based solutions. Rackspace were also winners of the award in 2005 and 2003.

Rackspace Hosting Launches Enhanced Partner Network

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:40:46 GMT

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing, has restructured its global Rackspace Partner Network to help partner companies grow their business, better serve customers and realise a competitive advantage. Rackspace actively solicited feedback from its partners to make enhancements to the Rackspace Partner Network, which include a new tiered structure, highly competitive financial incentives, greater access to training and marketing resources.

To add more structure and clarity to the program, Rackspace created four levels of commitment based on company size and level of sales: Platinum, Gold, Silver and Member. Additionally, Rackspace is offering partners aggressive commissions and, at certain partnership levels, will even pay commissions on upgrades and renewals, a significant benefit many competitors fail to match.

"We regard partners as an extension of the Rackspace family and have updated the Rackspace Partner Network to help ensure they receive the services and support necessary for long-term success," said Robert Fuller, vice president of Rackspace's Worldwide Channel. "Rackers worked closely with our partners to develop a program that creates the biggest impact and provides the best experience for them, which we believe will in turn impact the broader customer experience."

Rackspace's enhanced partner program includes several features available for partner companies at any level of membership, including:
- Access to a dedicated sales representative
- Sales and technical training
- OnBoarding support
- Access to the Rackspace Partner Network portal with exclusive marketing, sales and industry information as well as networking opportunities with other Rackspace partners

As companies move along the continuum from Member Partnership to Platinum Partnership, the new Rackspace program offers additional benefits including:
- Access to a dedicated channel manager
- Access to the searchable partner database on Rackspace.com as well as the database on the Rackspace Partner Network portal
- An opportunity to participate in partner company and/or Rackspace generated marketing activities
- Inclusion in promotions to Rackspace customer and partner base
- Discounts/commissions on upgrades and renewal contracts

"Sitecore has built its foundation on providing partners and customers with the best Web CMS platform, so it's a natural extension to partner with Rackspace for its unmatched service and reliable hosting solutions," said Jason Crea, VP, Client and Partner Engagement Sitecore, a new member of the Rackspace Partner Network. "Performance, security, scalability and price are critical elements for our customers in building and hosting websites, blogs, and other Web applications. Based on Rackspace's past successes we anticipate a valued experience for our joint customers."

"Q just entered its second decade of designing, building and enhancing brands online. Rackspace has been with us since the beginning, and we're excited to re-launch our partnership in the program and reaffirm our shared commitment to support," said Sean Breen, Founder and CTO, Q-Industries, a longstanding and valued Rackspace partner. "Rackspace continues to provide the critical infrastructure that both Q and our clients need to maximize ROI and minimize capital expenditures."

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting UK is the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including Green Hosting, Managed Hosting, hosting services.

The study, conducted by LoudHouse on behalf of Rackspace, investigated the views of more than 441 IT managers at mid-size enterprises and revealed that approximately one third of their IT staff's time is spent on server management, which is liable to limit their ability to focus on strategic initiatives that could benefit the business. Fifty eight percent of respondents cited the 'hassle of managing servers' as a challenge for their organization, while 61% of IT managers said 'time to drive innovation' was a challenge.

Additionally, on-site servers were seen to also cause 'server stress' for IT managers, who cited 'the need to be available 24x7', 'hardware issues and maintenance', and 'after-hours calls and issues' as the top three server management issues. The survey also found that 51% of respondents have made mistakes in their server capacity planning. Fifteen percent have bought too many servers and 36% have failed to buy enough. This leaves businesses exposed to the risks of financial waste and the inability to cope with user demand by not getting server spending right the first time.

The survey also revealed that 35% of companies identify themselves as ‘proactive and slightly ahead of the curve’ when it comes to describing their approach to new technologies, while 28% remain ‘cautious and reactive.’ When it comes to hosting and cloud computing, barriers to adoption include assurances of reliability (29%), evidence of cost savings (28%) and assurances of security (27%).

"IT should be an enabler," said Lanham Napier, president and chief executive officer of Rackspace Hosting. "The survey seems to reveal that a huge chunk of time and resources are spent keeping the lights on and preventing problems. Rackspace, with its world class Fanatical Support, can free organizations from the hassle of server management and enable their IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives that will positively impact the business."

About the Survey
Rackspace's online survey research was conducted in September 2009 and involved 441 US and UK-based IT decision-makers at companies with 100-500 employees.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in hosting, cloud computing and dedicated servers and has been ranked in the Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, hosting exchange and private cloud solutions, housed in our hosting company has hired renowned hosting industry strategist Andrew Schroepfer. In his role, Schroepfer will cover the trend in depth from how providers are evolving to how real businesses are making this trend pay off.

"A new way to run business computing is emerging," said Lanham Napier, president and CEO of Rackspace. "We have countless business customers tell us they are finished buying servers and are looking for a computing partner. People don't want to buy standalone computing, they want computing as a service with Fanatical Support. This trend will have major implications on the entire IT industry, and there is no one more qualified to cover it day-to-day than Andy."

NoMoreServers.com will feature daily and unique commentary explaining the next era in computing. In addition to filtering and reviewing interesting developments and third-party content about the NoMoreServers computing era, the site will feature daily commentary and a live community portal for visitors to engage on the topic and offers a white paper on the subject for community members.

Schroepfer has been a key analyst in the hosting industry since its inception in the late 1990s. From his beginnings at Piper Jaffray where he developed and managed the VoIP (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol) industry's primary market statistics, Schroepfer published a 270-page report on the dis-aggregation of communications which sparked his coverage of the Web hosting industry. He then joined Goldman Sachs as VP and senior equity analyst on the Internet Infrastructure Services industry during the time when Equinix, Loudcloud (now HP), and Webex (now Cisco) were executing their IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). In late 2000, Schroepfer founded, led, and later sold Tier1 Research, the leading specialist research firm on the hosting and data centre industry whose insights and data remain highly relevant.

"Having covered the hosting industry since its inception, and having strongly recommended Rackspace since 2001, I am excited to now become a Racker," said Andy Schroepfer. "I have always said Rackspace will be more than just a leader in hosting, and I am honoured to join the 2,700-strong Fanatical Support team tasked with sustaining and evolving our leadership role as the IT value chain is recast."

Notes to Editors:
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support by delivering a portfolio of hosted IT services, including virtualisation, hosted exchange, dedicated server, cloud hosting and Email and Apps.

Rackspace Cloud to stream Keta Keta viral videos

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:49:05 GMT

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing, has announced that leading viral video advertising agency, Keta Keta, will be hosting its video portfolio and movie previews in the Rackspace Cloud.

Ronen Lefler, CEO, Keta Keta said: "Effectively showcasing our viral videos has become a real challenge as the amount of content that we have to stream has grown. Moving to the Rackspace Cloud has enabled us to showcase videos to a global audience without interruption. We chose Rackspace due to its focus on customer service and support, as well as the flexibility and efficiency of The Rackspace Cloud Files solution."

As the viral video market continues to explode, with traffic increasing 178% over the last 12 months (Source: Econsultancy's 2009 Internet Statistics report), Keta Keta needed to maximize opportunities across consumer brands by promoting its videos to a global audience. It launched a new corporate website in March 2009 to support this need and turned to Rackspace Hosting to provide a reliable and cost-effective hosting solution to stream multiple movies to over 100 different countries.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace Hosting said: "Hosting business critical applications in the cloud is something we do on a regular basis and we are delighted that Keta Keta has chosen us to support its corporate awareness drive. We understand the demands placed on websites by streaming rich media content and believe the cloud's flexible, pay-as-you go structure makes it an ideal choice to meet these new media needs."

The Rackspace Cloud Files provides unlimited online storage for media, including backups, video files, or user content. Its benefits include:
- Scalable, dynamic storage. Enabling users to use as much or little as they want and only pay for what they use
- Easy file management through an online control panel
- Lightning speed file sharing through Limelight Networks CDN technology

Keta Keta, the viral video partner of ad:tech 2009, is an advertising agency with in-house creative, production, seeding and tracking departments. It has launched hundreds of successful viral video campaigns that have entertained and engaged people around the world for customers including LG, Fiat, MSN, L'Oreal and Orange.

- ENDS -

Notes to editors

About Rackspace
As the world's leader and specialist in hosting, Rackspace Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry's best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable.
A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective.

Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support, furthering the company's mission to be one of the world's greatest service companies. Rackspace was voted in the top 10 for Customer Focus in the European Business Awards, 2009 and was awarded the FT Laureate Award in 2009 for being one of the best places to work in the UK for five years running. It also featured in the top 30 of both the Sunday Times 100 Best companies to work for list and the Financial Times Great Place to Work Awards, 2009.

Rackspace's portfolio of hosted services includes hosted exchange, managed hosting, dedicated servers, cloud hosting, virtualisation and managed exchange.

Rackspace wins joint server farm tender to support MoD websites

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:24:01 GMT

Rackspace Hosting, the world's leader in hosting, has announced it has won a three year, competitive deal to provide fully managed support to the Joint Server Farm (JSF), a secure hosting environment for Ministry of Defence (MoD) websites. The partnership will see MoD, Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force websites consolidated onto a single, virtualised infrastructure to enable easier management, greater efficiencies and scalability.

Rackspace beat 18 other companies to win the contract to support the JSF following a European Journal Competition and tender for contract. Through the deal Rackspace will provide MoD partners with the flexibility to manage and change websites quickly to meet user demand. It will also provide enhanced security from firewalls and intrusion detection devices, which constantly monitor for threats, round-the-clock access to certified engineers and a 100% network uptime guarantee, backed by its service level agreement.

Rackspace's EMEA managing director Brian Thomson said: "We are delighted to have extended our relationship with the MoD by winning this tender in what was a hard fought pitch by lots of companies. At a time when costs and efficiencies are being brought to the forefront, we know we can truly help simplify the MoD infrastructure to meet these challenges."

The JSF is a single infrastructure for all services, websites and applications. It currently supports a number of well-known MoD campaigns, such as the recruiting website for the Army, Start Thinking Soldier as well as the Army Pathfinder programme. It also supports Navy and Air Force recruitment campaigns, all of the cadets' sites, a number of admin sites and facilitates small short-term public information campaign sites.

The MoD created the JSF because it had lots of disparate sites on different infrastructures, which were hard to maintain, inefficient and unscalable. With the growing influence of the internet it was also decided that a central hosting UK resource that departments could tap into for their web requirements was needed. In addition to this, the MoD was bound to meet the Transformational Government Agenda (TGA), which requires rationalisation of websites across all government departments. The MoD also moved to virtual servers for its consolidated infrastructure to provide greater flexibility when managing the sites.

Around 70% of MoD websites are currently hosted on Rackspace infrastructure and this deal extends the company's partnership with ArmyNET, the award-winning portal which allows soldiers to keep in touch with their families.

Rackspace consolidated 67 servers to 12 physical hypervisors and 72 virtual servers by implementing virtualisation across the MoD infrastructure. This solution when combined with a raft of changes to the contract cost model, including a reduction in SAN spindle storage costs, resulted in a reduction of overall costs. It also provides greater efficiencies for power and space, with a lower number of overall servers.

About Rackspace Hosting:
As the world's leader and specialist in hosting, Rackspace Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry's best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable.

A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective. Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support, furthering the company's mission to be one of the world's greatest service companies. Rackspace featured in the top 30 of both the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For list and the Financial Times Great Place to Work Awards, 2008.

Rackspace's portfolio of hosted services includes hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud's single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimisation that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

"Rackspace provides an excellent option for customers to take advantage of the cloud," said Dan Chu, vice president, emerging products and markets, VMware. "Enterprises who purchase the Rackspace Private Cloud can count on the powerful combination of VMware's industry-leading virtualisation platform and Rackspace's reliable hosting environment and infrastructure."

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualisation solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilisation and lower capital and operating costs that VMware's virtualisation provides.

"Rackspace is implementing a true hybrid hosting vision that allows customers to create a blend of the right hosting solutions - from a dedicated server, to multi-tenant cloud to specialised application hosting such as hosted exchange -each backed by our industry leading support. The Rackspace Private Cloud is one piece of the entire hybrid vision", said John Engates, Rackspace CTO. "Computing is changing at a rapid pace, and customers require that we stay ahead of the curve to continue providing best-in-class offers. We view the Rackspace Private Cloud as having a large impact for our enterprise customers who need the flexibility, scalability, and reliability provided by VMware's virtualisation, paired with the control and security of a dedicated environment. It is the best of both worlds for those enterprises looking to explore the benefits of external cloud solutions, without as much risk."

Rackspace's portfolio of hosted services includes managed exchange, managed hosting, hybrid hosting and cloud hosting.

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Rocket PR
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