Acquia, the enterprise guide to social publishing, and Rackspace Hosting, the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, have announced that they have entered into an agreement enabling both companies to deliver a broader range of solutions to their customers.

Relationship offers large organizations comprehensive cloud-based services and Drupal expertise

DrupalCon- San Francisco, CA – April  19, 2010– Acquia, the enterprise guide to social publishing, and Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry, have announced that they have entered into an agreement enabling both companies to deliver a broader range of solutions to their customers.  Acquia will provide Enterprise-class Drupal support, remote administration and global training for Rackspace, and Rackspace will serve as a partner to Acquia for Enterprise hosting services.
With enterprises utilizing more cloud-based web services, including social and digital media applications, Rackspace has seen a significant uptick in Drupal installations across its customer base.  Supporting thousands of clients running Drupal for web content management, Rackspace required Drupal services to meet customer demand. Through this agreement with Acquia, Rackspace is now able to deliver a range of solutions to its diverse customer base.

“The traction that Drupal has made in the enterprise market has been tremendous and joining forces with Acquia to extend our offering to the Drupal customers we already support was a natural fit,” said John Engates, Rackspace CTO. “This partnership presents a great opportunity to further drive Drupal’s reach within large organizations and we’re excited to be working with Acquia to make that happen.”

Rackspace recently launched Rackspace Media Services, an enterprise-level solution providing an open source, direct-to-consumer (D2C) web infrastructure for the music recording industry and other companies that rely on critical website uptime. The collaboration with Acquia adds a layer of additional tools, resources and training, and extends the value of Drupal for enterprise customers.

Acquia will be offering new options that incorporate Rackspace’s cloud and Managed hosting services in addition to its current cloud offerings of Acquia hosting.  Acquia Hosting is a highly available, cloud-based Drupal hosting service for deployments of Drupal.   Customers will now be able to receive full access to Acquia’s team of Drupal experts for technical and service support.

“Rackspace has a goal to provide Fanatical Support to its customers and Acquia shares that customer service focus,” said Tim Bertrand, Vice President of Business Development for Acquia. “Our relationship with Rackspace extends our enterprise hosting capabilities and offerings to an even larger base of enterprises.”

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The San Antonio-based company provides its customers Fanatical Support ® in their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

About Acquia
Acquia helps organizations of all sizes build social publishing websites quickly, easily and with a lower total cost of ownership by leveraging Drupal, the open source social publishing platform that blends content and community. Our products, services and support enable companies to leverage the power, technical innovation and economic value of Drupal while simplifying the experience, removing the complexity and minimizing the risk.  Please visit: http://acquia.com.  Download Acquia Drupal, the completely free Drupal distribution, at http://acquia.com/downloads.

About Drupal
The Drupal social publishing system has been downloaded over two million times since its inception and powers more than 400,000 web sites globally. Drupal includes an enterprise class content management system and is used to deliver a wide variety of web applications including single or multi-user blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, e-commerce, and many more. Assisted by a thriving ecosystem of consultants and developers, a diverse set of organizations use Drupal, including SonyBMG, Warner Brothers Records, the New York Observer, Forbes, Disney, Intel, Harvard University, and Amnesty International. A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source technology. For more information, visit http://drupal.org.

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 development and returns associated with referrals from the agreement between Rackspace and Acquia; any anticipated operational and financial benefits; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include (i) Acquia’s failure to refer business to Rackspace, (ii) the failure of Acquia’s products or services, (iii) changes in technology or the competitive environment which are unfavorable to Aquia’s products or services , (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impacts consumer spending habits, and (v) other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2010, filed with the SEC on February 26, 2010. Except as required by law, 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.

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