Rackspace Appoints Taylor Rhodes as its First-Ever Chief Customer Officer
SAN ANTONIO, TX – September 4, 2013 – Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has appointed Taylor Rhodes as its first-ever Chief Customer Officer (CCO), leading the firm's Enterprise, SMB and International divisions. As CCO, Rhodes will lead Rackspace’s Sales and Fanatical Support organizations globally.
Formerly Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Rackspace International, Rhodes’s mission as CCO is to bring the power of Rackspace’s Hybrid Cloud portfolio, backed by Fanatical Support®, to Rackspace’s global markets. One of his highest priorities is to evolve Fanatical Support into an even higher value model for our customers, enabling Rackspace to advance its position as the service leader in the industry.
“We are experiencing a generational shift in IT toward hybrid cloud architectures, a shift that is enabling technology to move from a being a cost center to being a powerhouse of business innovation,” Rhodes said. “The power of Rackspace’s hybrid cloud portfolio enables our customers to choose the right combination of price and performance for any given workload, and the power of Fanatical Support lets them maximize the value of the people they employ to develop innovative new applications.”
Rhodes will move from London to the Rackspace US office in San Antonio, Texas, to take up his new role. Rackspace’s Vice President of Enterprise Sales, Jeff Cotten, will move from Texas to Zurich to assume the Managing Director, International role.
“Taylor has expanded Rackspace's International business across the UK, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions achieving impressive results injust two and a half years. Now as our CCO, I know he will bring his first-hand knowledge of how Fanatical Support works in the new Hybrid Cloud world and an understanding of our market and customers,” said Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier. “In this new management mix, our International business will benefit from Jeff Cotten's experience building our Fortune 1000 sales and support enablement functions in the US. He has helped customers realize the value of working with Rackspace to transform their traditional IT models to hybrid cloud models. We are excited to welcome him to the International team.”
Since joining Rackspace in 2008, Cotten has served as a leader in the company’s sales and support organization, and played a central role in building its Enterprise sales and sales enablement functions in the US. Formerly with EDS (now HP), Cotten has a depth of expertise serving large customers in the IT services market.
“This is an incredibly exciting time to join the Rackspace International team. Hybrid cloud is a global movement, and Fanatical Support is creating growth opportunities for us in exciting new markets,” said Cotten. “Rackspace is poised to build on our Hybrid Cloud leadership position to expand in Asia Pacific and EMEA. The future looks bright and I look forward to leading the International team.”
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company and founder of OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace delivers its renowned Fanatical Support® to more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents. Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, which enable businesses to run their workloads where they run most effectively — whether on the public cloud, a private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk.
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, performance or market acceptance associated with the Rackspace’s hybrid cloud solutions, federated cloud services or other associated products and services; anticipated operational and financial benefits from Rackspace’s hybrid cloud solutions, federated cloud services or other associated products and services; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include including the possibility that expected benefits from the Rackspace cloud network program or the products and services offered through the Rackspace cloud network program may not materialize because the products or services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the products or services cost effectively, differentiate the products and services from competitive products and services or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the products or services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefits of the product, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the platform, products and services, and (vi) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the year ended March 31, 2012, filed with the SEC on May 9, 2013. 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.
