Rackspace^® today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide.

The Gartner assessment, performed by the firm’s IT industry analysts, evaluates service providers based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to execute. It categorizes providers in quadrants labeled Niche Players, Challengers, Visionaries, and Leaders. Rackspace was among the 20 providers assessed by Gartner, and is one of three providers in the Leaders quadrant.

“In our view, being recognized as a Leader in this Magic Quadrant for two years in a row is a testament to the breadth and depth of our portfolio and our expertise in delivering next-generation IT services,” said Joe Eazor, CEO of Rackspace. “Businesses within every industry are moving to consume IT in a more-agile and cost-efficient manner, as a service, across multiple public and private cloud platforms and technologies. We are constantly adding new capabilities to help businesses navigate and operate in this complex environment.”

Rackspace serves more than 140,000 customers worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 100, and maintains data centers on five continents. The company helps customers through every phase of their digital transformation including planning, implementation, ongoing operations management, and optimization, across applications, data, security, and infrastructure.

“We are pleased to be recognized by our customers and Gartner. We feel it defines us as one of the pre-eminent leaders in offering managed services for all of the world’s leading public cloud platforms,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, vice president and general manager, Managed Public Clouds at Rackspace. “Rackspace offers our customers a truly differentiated, next-generation services experience that uses a broad end-to-end approach to help accelerate digital transformation. Leveraging our expertise across the world’s leading hyperscale public clouds, we help customers choose the right public cloud for their specific technical and business needs based on a data-driven framework. We enable customers to migrate applications in a rapid fashion to the public cloud and then ensure the highest levels of ongoing performance at the lowest total cost, using our cost and architecture optimization tooling. We will continue to invest in our multi-cloud technology and specialist talent to drive significant value for our customers.”

Rackspace now has one of the largest workforces of cloud experts in the world. The company began offering managed cloud services for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft^® Azure^® in 2015. Two years later, it expanded its portfolio to include managed support for Google^® Cloud Platform (GCP) and the Alibaba Cloud. Rackspace provides distinct offerings and varying service levels for AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba, delivering 24x7x365 access to certified experts, tooling and automation, migration services, architectural guidance, deployment, advanced monitoring, proactive optimization and remediation. Rackspace serves more than 1,100 customers across its managed public cloud portfolio.

In 2017, Rackspace expanded its offering for AWS to include Fanatical Support^® for AWS Professional Services. It also announced an enhanced, strategic channel relationship with AWS to streamline the experience for customers moving to AWS by providing solution and migration advisory services, migration service delivery and advanced migration tooling. As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, the highest tier within the AWS Partner Network, Rackspace has also earned a range of AWS Competencies including Migration, Storage, Microsoft Workloads, Oracle, DevOps, and Marketing and Commerce.

Rackspace also expanded its Azure capabilities in July 2017 to include more robust support for hybrid Microsoft cloud deployments with the launch of Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure Stack. This offering provides a consistent and agile experience across Azure and Azure Stack, including portal, API, and service architecture.

In addition, Rackspace became the first managed services partner for GCP in 2017 and was chosen as Google’s exclusive managed services partner to provide Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) support. The CRE support offering will deliver greater value to customers by allowing Rackspace engineers to work on everything from inspecting and helping optimize customer code and design, to implementation and operational procedures.

Rackspace’s multi-cloud approach allows it to deliver greater value to customers by managing multiple IT platforms and technologies. In addition to its managed cloud offerings for the leading public clouds, Rackspace’s broad portfolio of managed, next-generation IT solutions includes other infrastructure solutions across managed colocation, managed hosting and private clouds – along with services for applications, data, and security. These services include database administration for most relational and non-relational databases, technical and functional support for packaged applications like SAP, Oracle, Sitecore and others, along with Rackspace Managed Security for advanced cloud security and compliance requirements.

For more information on Rackspace’s position as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide, please view a complimentary copy of the full report here.

Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide”, Craig Lowery, Mark D. Ray, et al., 29 March 2018.

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