Rackspace Adding Support for Microsoft Azure Stack

Rackspace is launching support for businesses migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure Stack.

The managed cloud provider announced its “Fanatical Support” for Azure Stack, which includes security services, a single point-of-contact and monitoring.

“Azure Stack is well-positioned to become the world’s leading hybrid cloud solution, but many customers will need help operating it at scale to realize its full benefits,” said Ramakant Pandrangi, Rackspace’s vice president and general manager of Microsoft Clouds. “Through Fanatical Support for Azure Stack, Rackspace will make the solution accessible to organizations of all sizes.”

Azure Stack is an extension of the public cloud Azure. As of yesterday, Microsoft partners can use Azure Stack to develop hybrid cloud environments for their customers.

Pandrangi says his company has earned experience with hybrid cloud through managing both Azure and Microsoft’s private cloud for the last two years.

“We’ve been working closely with Microsoft since the first technical preview of Azure Stack to ensure Rackspace is the go-to provider for support for customers at any stage in their adoption of the platform, regardless of hybrid cloud skills or expertise – from testing with a single-node proof of concept, to deploying a production-ready Azure Stack cloud backed by Rackspace expertise and Fanatical Support,” he said. “We are excited to be an at-launch partner for Azure Stack and look forward to our continued collaboration with Microsoft in the future.”

Mike Schutz, general manager of Microsoft’s cloud platform Cloud Platform, says Rackspace will help maximize Azure Stack’s “customer value.”

“Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, providing new ways for our customers to build hybrid applications,” Schutz said. “Rackspace brings great experience with and expertise on Microsoft technologies, and offers great value in the managed services they can provide across Azure and Azure Stack.”

Rackspace made the announcement at Microsoft Inspire partner conference.