Rackspace Rolls Out Global Professional Services For Enterprise Customers

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Rackspace is launching new professional services designed to help customers move workloads out of their data centers and onto public and private cloud platforms.

Global Solutions and Services (GSS) will provide enterprises, as well as midmarket businesses, with the knowledge and support needed to transform their IT operations. Through GSS, Rackspace architects and engineers will work with customers to plan, assess, design, migrate, manage and optimize their journey to the cloud, helping to “ensure they achieve maximum performance, agility and cost-efficiency,” the company said.

GSS now is available globally.

Rachel Cassidy, Rackspace’s vice president of global solutions and services, tells Channel Partners that GSS will create many net-new opportunities for partners, as well as build upon/expand existing opportunities.

“Partners have access to customers in the Rackspace account base, which includes customers in 150 countries and more than half of the Fortune 100,” she said. “Rackspace partners are crucial to GSS success because they help us address bandwidth and expertise in key product and service areas as we build out our multi-cloud support. Partners also help us to fill gaps in the areas that are not core to our business.”

Cassidy said partners can help in any or all of the following areas: security/compliance advisory and implementation skills; migration architect/engineering expertise (multi-cloud/platform specific); application refactoring for cloud readiness; DevOps expertise; big data; ERP services and support; joint solution offerings; and load testing.{ad}

“GSS will help partners overcome numerous barriers that are common in the space,” she said. “With an added focus on enterprise and midmarket businesses, GSS will give smaller partners a seat at the table with large, fast-growing customers. Rackspace also helps partners mitigate delays in sourcing and contracts by conducting business directly through our business, making them more nimble and responsive to customer needs. Furthermore, partners can capitalize on Rackspace’s brand recognition as a leading provider of managed cloud and Fanatical Support, as well as our growing account base of strategic customers seeking managed services and expertise in a multi-cloud world.”

Rackspace offers specialized knowledge and support for dedicated servers and for the three major private clouds, powered by VMware, Microsoft and OpenStack.

Blake Wetzel, Rackspace’s vice president of channel sales, said GSS aligns “perfectly” with the company’s overall channel strategy.

“It affords a great opportunity to grow partners’ businesses, not only by integrating Rackspace managed services, but also by demonstrating the value our partners can bring to solving customer IT challenges and help them take full advantage of IT opportunities to achieve their business needs,” he said. “The differentiated service our partners bring to market can now be exposed to a larger community of customers through the GSS Program.”