EMEA Cloud News: Rackspace, VMware, AWS Make Noteworthy Moves

Cloud computing activity in the EMEA region is speeding up as the new year kicks into gear. From Rackspace and VMware to AWS, check out some of the news you may have missed.

Blackburn Replaces Norfolk as Rackspace EMEA Managing Director

Rackspace has named Martin Blackburn as managing director for EMEA.

Rackspace’s Martin Blackburn

According to Data Economy Newsroom, Blackburn will oversee Rackspace’s strategy and growth throughout the U.K., Northern Europe, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Middle East.

Blackburn comes to Rackspace with a 35-year career at companies including Marconi, HP, EDS, Logica and IBM. He recently held the position of executive chair at Marlin Equity Partners.

“We are starting 2020 with exciting plans and Martin brings a wealth of leadership experience and technology expertise which will accelerate our growth,” said Rackspace CEO Kevin Jones. “Our EMEA business is a critical part of our future and I’m confident that the organisation will continue to thrive.”

Blackburn replaces Darren Norfolk.

“[Rackspace] is known for its unparalleled customer experience and supporting customers during every phase of their transformation with cloud specialisation and continuous modernisation, working flexibly and with agility,” Blackburn said. “We have solid foundations to catapult our growth in 2020 and beyond.”

AWS Outposts Now Reaches 7 More Global Regions

Amazon Web Services has expanded its new hybrid cloud platform, Outposts, to seven new regions.

Enterprises in Canada, London, Paris, Stockholm, Bahrain, Hong Kong and Singapore now may take advantage of the fully managed service, rented on an as-a-service basis.

“We take care of monitoring, maintaining and upgrading your Outposts,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, wrote in a Dec. 3 blog announcing the long-awaited product. “All of the hardware is modular and can be replaced in the field without downtime. When you need more processing or storage, or want to upgrade to newer generations of EC2 instances, you can initiate the request with a couple of clicks and we will take care of the rest.”

AWS says Outposts features local processing and low latency, all from a single vendor.

“Everything that you and your team already know about AWS still applies,” Barr wrote. “You use the same APIs, tools and operational practices. You can create a single deployment pipeline that targets your Outposts and your cloud-based environments, and you can create hybrid architectures that span both.”

AWS connects each Outpost to a specific region and controls it from that data center. The region treats a collection of up to 16 racks at a single location as a unified capacity pool, Barr said. The collection can be associated with subnets of one or more VPCs in the parent region.

The Outposts hardware, meanwhile, is the same as what AWS uses in its data centers, with some additional security devices, Barr said. AWS delivers the equipment fully assembled.

VMware Expands to South Africa’s Teraco

VMware Cloud has expanded to Teraco Data Environments, a colo data center in South Africa.

That means service providers in Cape Town and Johannesburg now may offer developer-ready cloud solutions.

“With VMware Cloud now available within Teraco, enterprises can take advantage of private and secure multicloud connectivity, and quickly deploy hybrid cloud infrastructures,” said Teraco CEO Jan Hnizdo, according to Data Economy News. “The premise of Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centre offering is to serve local and global markets at the digital edge and through channels critical to the connected world we live in. VMware … assists us in making our offering richer.”

BP Goes All In on AWS

BP is putting all its data into Amazon’s cloud.

The energy and petroleum giant will close its private data centers in Europe and migrate all the information stored there, including 900 applications, to AWS, Robotics and Automation News reported on Monday.

BP will take advantage of AWS cloud computing services including analytics, storage, machine learning, security and databases, the news outlet said.

The BP announcement comes about a week after the U.K. Home Office expanded its cloud computing contract solely with AWS.