Why you should be using Rackspace

The September 5th Telarus Tuesday call brought Rackspace Regional Partner Manager, Vicki Patten to introduce the new Rackspace team for Telarus and to talk about their sales tools. The entire recording can be found here.

Who is Rackspace?

Since 1999, Rackspace has been listening to their customers as they explore how technology can better serve their business.Rackspace currently has twelve data centers around the world, which allows them to provide scale to customers. They are currently in 150 countries and the portfolio they provide includes dedicated, hybrid, and cloud services. Most importantly, Rackspace has over 6,200 employees who are there to support you and your customers.

So why Rackspace? Rackspace is very good at bringing on top talent from all the various aspects of IT. They currently have over 3,000 hard-to-find cloud engineers who have a combination of certifications across the board and real-world experience. Don’t settle for one-and-done, lift-and-shift support. Rackspace will architect, migrate, secure and operate your cloud while continually helping you optimize it for tangible business results. All of this expertise culminates in what they call Fanatical Support, which is their unsurpassed results-obsessed customer service that’s there when you need it without having to jump through hoops to get it. Their team will go above and beyond to support your business around the clock.

Rackspace will help your customers from start to finish. They can help your customers architect their infrastructure; they will let you know what it should look like and where they should go based upon the applications they’re running and workloads. There’s also the choice of what type of environment will be the best because Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenStack all have different reasons why that specific environment might be better for you than others. It might be that dedicated is this answer, regardless RackSpace will help you secure it, migrate it, operate and will then help you optimize it as well.

We mentioned OpenStack previously, so what is it? OpenStack was founded by Rackspace with the help from NASA in 2010, they now operate the world’s largest OpenStack cloud and have experience scaling OpenStack clouds to thousands of nodes. Rackspace backs their OpenStack solutions with industry leading SLAs including a 99.99% API uptime guarantee for private clouds and a 100% network availability guarantee for clouds in a Rackspace data center. They deliver fully-managed OpenStack private clouds in a any data center in the world. This enables you to get close to your customer to maximize response times while meeting security, compliance and data sovereignty requirements. Learn more about OpenStack here.

Rackspace was previously recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Enabled Managed Hosting, North America in 2014 and 2015. Now Gartner recognizes Rackspace as a Leader in their inaugural Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide.

When is it a good fit?

You might be wondering how you can tell if someone is a good fit for a cloud opportunity, and when you should bring RackSpace in to help you. If the customer is running on old infrastructure, has older servers, storage and an old data center that needs updating, that’s a great opportunity to start talking to them about moving their applications off their older infrastructure to an environment they don’t have to worry about managing. A few other ways you can tell if someone might be a good fit for cloud:

• Large number of custom applications
• Venture capital backed
• Private equity backed
• Acquiring companies
• Divesting divisions
• If they are an analytics based company
• If they are an eCommerce Company
• Asking about Office 365
• Spending over $10,000 a month with AWS/Azure

Just like there are ways to tell if a customer is a good fit for cloud, there are ways to tell if someone isn’t. If they’re a company that is looking for colocation and they are in a fairly stable environment, they are probably not a very good fit for Rackspace. A few questions that you should be asking to make it easier for you to tell if they are not a good fit are:

• Does the company:
  • Value capital IT expenses? (Depreciating Gear)
  • Have a large IT staff?
  • Have highly specific regulatory requirements
  • Government (State or Federal)
• Is the company’s Infrastructure usage:
  • Very steady
  • Highly customized

A good thing to remember is that even though you might find a customer who is a good fit for cloud, there are challenges that come along with cloud which you will have to address. In 2013, most companies were spending a huge chunk of their money on traditional IT. Nowadays the spending is going towards cloud services and having other people help them build their infrastructure. As we move more towards cloud services, there are challenges we have to deal with. Although challenges have been out there for years, there are now three that people are the most concerned about when it comes to cloud. One of those three main challenges is the lack of resources and expertise — there’s not enough people out there with the expertise to help companies do things on their own. Security is and has always been a concern. Lastly people are very concerned with managing their cloud spend. Regardless of this, Rackspace is here to help you through these challenges.

Why Rackspace?

The world today is multi-cloud and requires start to finish expertise. Rackspace is the only company with deep expertise. They have the world’s leading cloud technologies and are backed by a history of innovation and service. When it comes to the mission critical applications that your customers are relying on to run their business and make revenue, Rackspace can help them go to market more quickly. When you work with Rackspace and get them involved early in the sales cycle you will see a higher average revenue per customer as well as a higher close rate.

Get Rackspace involved! You can contact Allie Stalter or Vicki Patten at allie.stalter@rackspace.com and vicki.patten@rackspace.com. For more information visit www.rackspace.com or contact your Telarus PSM if you have a sales opportunity.