Rackspace Completes “Public Cloud Trifecta” with Google Partnership

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Rackspace Completes “Public Cloud Trifecta” with Google Partnership

“Why now?” That’s one of the questions Patrick Lee, general manager of the new Google business at Rackspace, was asked after Google SVP Diane Green announced Wednesday that Rackspace would be Google’s first partner to offer managed Support for Google Cloud Platform. Because Rackspace already offers support for AWS and Microsoft Azure, the Google partnership completes what CRN called “the hyperscale public cloud trifecta.” It came, Lee said, in direct response to customer demand. Google Cloud “The momentum of customer demand around Google Cloud is really growing,” he said from the floor of the conference Thursday, noting that attendance at this year’s Google Next appears to have tripled from 2016. Analyst firm 451 Research has also validated that growth, reporting that the adoption of Google Cloud Platform has almost doubled in the past year. At the same time, “Rackspace’s expertise at scale on the world’s leading public clouds puts us in a unique position to add value for our customers,” Lee said. Rackspace launched Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure 19 months ago, followed closely by Fanatical Support for AWS; growth rates for both have been in the high double digits. That experience and expertise, Lee explained, “underscores our credibility to talk to customers first and foremost about their desired business outcomes, with infrastructure being secondary to that. We can recommend absolutely the best platforms for their workloads, whether that’s one (or more) of the top three public clouds, private clouds, or dedicated hosting.” Indeed, Google’s Green called Rackspace “a pioneer” from the stage during her keynote Wednesday, while a blog post from Google on the announcement noted that Rackspace already has Google Certified Professionals on staff, even as beta support is still a few months away. managed services Google Cloud Platform “That’s one thing about our Rackers,” said Lee, using a common term for Rackspace employees. “Their appetite for knowledge is just insatiable. Without any prompting, they’ve been getting certified on Google Cloud, because they want to be part of what we’re building.” Lee told the story of one UK Racker, who, with no knowledge of the partnership, took personal time off and paid to fly to San Francisco to attend Google Next, just because he wants to learn. “This is why Rackspace stands out,” Lee said. “We’re obsessed with learning and taking care of our customers.” And just as Rackspace offers potential customers unique strengths around our expert service and support, Lee said, Google Cloud Platform offers its own strengths, around artificial intelligence and machine learning, plus big data and analytics, he said, that are “really resonating in the market.” Offering support for all three major public clouds “really rounds out what we can offer customers, in large part because we’re seeing more and more who are using multiple clouds.” That too, tracks with industry trends. According to the latest RightScale “State of the Cloud” survey, both the number of companies using multiple clouds, and the number of clouds they’re using, are growing, and finding the right expertise to manage those clouds remains a top concern. Finding the right expertise to manage all those clouds tied for first place as a top concern cited by respondents, along with ensuring security and managing cloud spending. As Rackspace CTO John Engates wrote in his recent post on the survey and the challenges facing organizations in this multi-cloud world: “Some providers sell and support only one cloud. Not surprisingly, they argue that their one size fits all. We take a different view. We help each customer find the best fit for its unique needs, running each workload on the cloud platform where it will achieve the best performance and cost efficiency.” Learn more about our managed support for Google Cloud Platform, or our expertise across any of the world's leading clouds — because one size doesn't fit all.