Rackspace has named Martin Blackburn as its new managing director for EMEA.
Blackburn will oversee Rackspace’s strategy and growth throughout the UK, Northern Europe, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Middle East.
Blackburn comes to Rackspace with a 35-year career at companies including Marconi, HP, EDS, Logica and IBM. He recently held the position of executive chair at Marlin Equity Partners.
Cloudy outfit Rackspace said that its year-long spruce up of the channel is continuing and it needs more partners.
It said that it is in a position to provide its partners with a wide number of options to take out to customer, across public, private and hybrid cloud environments, and as a result has seen its base increase.
At the moment it is contacting traditional VARs looking to take steps into the cloud as well as providing options for those looking to add more options for their customers looking at a multi-cloud strategy.
John Coulston, Director of Partners & Alliances, Rackspace, EMEA, said that it was building and investing more in the channel.
“We are definitely looking for more partners and have a significant growth target for our channel”, he added “We have pretty big aspirations in the channel space.”
Rackspace research shows that clients have significant problems with their cloud plans and identifies the critical role that the channel can play.
Rackspace’s report “Maintaining Momentum: Cloud Migration Learnings” found that indicated that 71 percent of businesses said that they were about two years into their public cloud journey and putting more workloads into a hosted environment was seen by many as a high priority.
But lots of customers are still to get genuinely into the cloud citing all sorts of problems, including costs and complexity.
The channel can help is with helping them scope out the costs properly and provide help with migration, the report said.
The report commissioned by Rackspace and conducted by Forrester Consulting surveyed the landscape across the UK, Germany, France and the US had some words of warning for those firms looking to try and do it all on their own.
The research found that 78 percent of users did recognise the role of a service partner and many said they were looking for experienced cloud providers that could help with migration issues.
Adam Evans, director of Professional Services at Rackspace said: “Cloud is the engine of digital transformation and a critical enablement factor for innovation, cost reduction and CX initiatives. But while most organisations we meet have started on their cloud journey, I would say the majority did not expect the scale of the ongoing challenge,” said A
“As a business generation, we are getting faster at new technology adoption, but we still seem to stumble when it comes to an understanding of the requirements (and limitations) of the business consuming it. Introducing new cloud-based operating practices across an entire organisation is rarely straightforward, as with anything involving people, processes and their relationship with technology,” he added.
Rackspace Hosting is to write a cheque for Datapipe and turn two of the world’s largest managed services providers into a global cloudy powerhouse.
This acquisition will provide Rackspace with a broad customer base and deep alliances spanning all of the major cloud operators as it attempts to be a multi-cloud management leader.
The deal comes only months after Rackspace agreed to buy TriCore Solutions, an application management specialist that at the time was its largest acquisition to date.
Rackspace did not say what it will pay for Datapipe. The acquisition will be financed with debt and equity.
The combined entity would see annual revenue of $2.4 billion, and employ roughly 6,700 people. Both MSPs have substantial hosting businesses through their own data centers, as well as partnerships with hyper-scale cloud providers. Both are among the largest MSPs in the AWS ecosystem.
Datapipe’s infrastructure, custom-built automation tools, extensive certifications and high-skilled employees will be valuable additions to Rackspace’s portfolio.
Rackspace has announced that it will offer managed services for Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Rackspace will be adding support for the company’s PaaS offering to its stable of cloud platforms, which includes OpenStack, Google Cloud Platform, VMWare, Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Rackspace’s vice president of applications and platforms, Brannon Lacey said: “Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry is Rackspace’s first step into the managed platform space, as we move up the stack to solutions that customers want our help. It is a solution that helps customers get up and running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry quickly and stay up and running, with operational support and proactive monitoring. This way, in-house teams can focus on innovation and getting out to market quickly while Rackspace handles the backend.”
Rackspace’s Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry service will also include multi-cloud support, as well as management for updates, feature releases and troubleshooting.
Pivotal president and COO Bill Cook said that the collaboration between Pivotal and Rackspace would “provide customers the option to manage their cloud environment, so they can focus on rapidly shipping code.”
Cloud management provider Rackspace has decided that it will pay its shareholders more than $4.3 billion and go private.
Apollo Global Management says it will pay $32 per share to buy out stakeholders and run Rackspace as a private company. The deal is not that bad, the stock closed at $30.19 per share.
The deal is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year. Actually this was all predicted a few weeks ago and this had caused Rackspace’s stock price to go up so the closing prices is little to do with the actual value of the company.
Rackspace wants to see off larger competition in the cloud management space and had been mulling over a buyout since 2014.
Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes said that the outfit had been presented with a significant opportunity today as mainstream companies move their computing out of corporate data centers and into multi-cloud models. Apollo and its partners take a patient, value-oriented approach to their funds’ investments, and value Rackspace’s strategy and unique culture.”
The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn claiming that the cloudy hosting provider Rackspace is going to be acquired.
The Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday that a deal with a private equity firm was imminent. Friday, a Reuters story said Apollo Global Management was working on a deal with the San Antonio-based company that could be worth more than $3.5 billion. Needless to say it has not happened yet.
The outfit has had a few problems expanding and had been looking to bring in private equity, regroup or restructure. There have been rumours for ages that they were ripe for the picking with a telecom provider thinking of buying them at one point.
But it seems that the company, despite having good offerings, is having a job saying anything relevant .
In May 2014, Rackspace informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had hired Morgan Stanley to formally explore a merger or acquisition. That September, Bloomberg News reported CenturyLink was looking to buy the company.
Speculation about potential suitors fizzled after Rackspace removed itself from the market and was unhappy with the offers it had received.
Startup AppFormix has created its own channel with industry heavyweight Rackspace.
The move breaks the tradition of startups launching partner programs with a handful of small VARs.
AppFormix has become a major distributor of OpenStack software and getting Rackspace’s support for its channel is a big win for the company which was only founded just three years ago.
Founder and CEO Sumeet Singh said the move will allow AppFormix to fully commit to a distribution channel strategy.
So far AppFormix has been selling its software directly, but with the launch of its channel program, “go on our predominant model is going to be to go through the partners,” Singh said, “especially Rackspace.”
“Rackspace is a dream partner. They are the founders of OpenStack, and we built this software initially to really simplify the OpenStack operations,” Singh said.
AppFormix focuses on hybrid environments and can monitor and optimise cloud infrastructure. Its technology evaluates the bare-metal servers, storage workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes platform originally developed by Google, and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure platform.
The platform analysis tools offer a cross-layer visibility, measure resource utilization and monitor application performance for better orchestration of hybrid cloud environments.
Channel veteran Ian Moyse has walked out of his job at Rackspace after 10 months.
Moyse was senior sales manager at Rackspace apparently cleaned out his desk a couple of weeks ago. No official reason has been given, and the only coincidence is that he just joined the board of the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) in a personal capacity. No reason that this would make a difference of course.
Before joining Rackspace, Moyse was sales director at Workbooks.com for three years and before that he was Webroot’s EMEA channel director for five years.
Moyse was named as one of LinkedIn’s top-10 “Power Profile” for technology alongside Sage CEO Stephen Kelly and former Apprentice candidate Lauren Riley.
No one is saying anything at the moment and we only have LinkedIn to go on.
Server company Rackspace has joined an IBM inspired server group, snubbing its primary chip supplier, Intel.
The Openpower foundation was formed a year ago and has something like 80 worldwide members, working on producing server technology built using IBM rather than Intel microprocessor architecture.
The group already has members including Nvidia, Tyan and Google.
Rackspace has been working behind the scenes with the group for over 18 months, but openly declared its hand yesterday. Senior director Aaron Sullivan said that Openpower has an open firmware stack, and better access to chips, memory and storage than, for example, Intel.
Other additions to the powerful consortium include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Mumbai Indian Institute of Technology, and worldwide distributor Avnet.
Openpower said its first summit will be held mid March at the San Jose Convention Center in California.
A VP at Rackspace has spread out his tarot cards and given his prediction on how the market will shift in 2014.
According to Nigel Beighton, VP of technology, the division of cloud computing into public and private clouds will be disrupted by the emergence of specialist cloud providers. They’ll target specific markets including finance, telecoms and retail – there will also be more application specific cloud based stuff – including cloud computing for CPU monitoring.
Platform as a Service is over hyped, thinks Beighton, but DevOps will be a better way of helping software development.
Mr Big Data will receive close care and attention from big tech vendors who will “take the time and complexity” out of operations and there will be consolidation of NOSQL technologies.
The NSA revelations will mean that we’ll see investments in better encryption – and that should allay some peoples’ concerns about cloud based platforms and systems.
Finally, Beighton believes that in 2014 everyone will go nuts about DevOps and that means developers and IT departments will have to work closer than ever before.
ChannelEye predicts that before 2013 comes to a close, we will see more predictions about what is going to happen next year.
Open cloud provider Rackspace has introduced an on demand, e-learning training course with a view to bringing about wider adoption of OpenStack technologies.
Customers will be able to register for courses that promise to teach ways to use and deploy OpenStack powered cloud. The on demand e-learning version of Rackspace’s OpenStack Fundamentals will be available to the public in October, though pre-registration is available now.
Additionally, Rackspace is introducing four further in-person courses.
These are Networking-Neutron, where students can learn how to use Neutron to provide Networking-as-a-Service, as well as encouraging students to use an API to build and configure networking infrastructure. Building Cloudy Apps sees students using Python to learn about horizontal scaling and APIs, security in the cloud is self explanatory, and so’s Hadoop on OpenStack.
Certified training partners for the Fundamentals courses include, worldwide, New Horizons, Skyline Advanced Technology Services, and Intelligent Cloud Technologies.
Course overviews and schedules are available at Rackspace’s training website.
Rackspace boasts it’s expanding the program because of rapid growth in OpenStack, including over 10,000 contributors at its three year anniversary in July this year. Citing the BSA global cloud scorecard for 2013, 14 million cloud jobs should emerge by 2015, so there’s plenty of room for Rackspace to work.
“Rackspace recognises the need for comprehensive educational courses and delivery models and is fundamentally revolutionising OpenStack training to include a Certified Training Partner Programme and on demand e-learning course,” said Tony Campbell, director of training and certification for OpenStack.
Tyan has launched products aimed at people looking for powerful and cheap computing performance.
The server platform design manufacturer has shown off the Tyan TA77-B7061, its latest and flexible 2U GPU supported platform; the S7042, entry-level dual socket motherboard -GT62A-B5512 and the GT20A-B7040, the “cost-effective” 1U server at CeBIT.
The TA77-B7061 is said to help consumers who are looking for accelerated data-processing and efficient computing performance as a result of supporting up to four GPUs in a 2U server chassis, it is also said to save server and rack space through the use of Intel Xeon Phi processors, NVIDIA Tesla K20 Series and ATI FirePro.
The TA77-B7061 supports Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 Series Processors, (8+8) DDR-III R/U/LR-DIMM, PCI-E x16 G3 slots, PCI-E x8 G3 slots, GbE ports and 2.5” HDDs.
The S7042 motherboard is targeted at the SMB market, claiming to offer these sectors a cost-effective platform. It is claimed to have multiple expansion slots and a cost-optimised dual socket motherboard designed for SMB and workstation environments.
Those looking for strong performance with a weak price tag are said to benefit from the GT62A-B5512 which is a one way 1U rackmount server, which is claimed to target nearline storage, and bring down the cost of server deployment.
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