Golden Parachute for Ex-Rackspace CEO Points to Him Getting Very Rich
Rackspace’s new CEO is set, too. Plus, we have news from TD Synnex, Oracle, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, more.
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The leadership shuffle at Rackspace Technology means big money for the two executives impacted.
New CEO Amar Maletira now will earn a salary of $900,000 per year ($20,000 more than his successor made) with an annual target bonus of 150% of that number. That’s per a new filing Rackspace submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And, once the Rackspace board approves, Maletira also will receive a one-time equity grant that will amount to about $15 million. That total will consist of 50% in restricted stock units vesting over three years and 50% in performance stock units. Maletira further will be eliglble for annual equity awards as of 2023. The total value for those could reach $11 million.
Wondering what former Rackspace CEO Kevin Jones is in line to net? Go to the next slide.
Kevin Jones will see some bucks of his own as he exits the Rackspace CEO role.
Jones remains an official employee until Oct. 30. If all goes as planned, Jones will collect a year’s worth of salary, as well as target bonus (about $1.2 million) and health benefits. He’ll also receive (get ready for some financial-ese here, courtesy of the Rackspace SEC filing) pro-rated vesting of the next vesting tranche of his time-based stock options granted in 2019 and vesting of 50% of his outstanding time-based restricted stock units granted in 2021.
On top of that, Jones will take home a grant of restricted stock units that will amount to about $1.2 million. Those will vest and settle if he complies with his restrictive covenants for 18 months following his termination, Rackspace said.
Finally, Jones will be eligible for reimbursement for certain relocation expenses, including fees for breaking leases and out-of-pocket costs for moving. The totals could come to around $3 million.
(Jones, by the way, isn’t out of work. He will move on as an “operating advisor” at Apollo Global Management.)
TD Synnex this week is holding its Inspire 2022 event. We caught a few minutes with Francisco Criado, vice president of cloud, data and IoT at the distributor (er, solutions aggregator, as the company is starting to call itself). The biggest takeaways resellers, managed service providers and other partners should know? TD Synnex has playbooks and “Click to Run” offerings that take partners — and, as a result, end users — through cloud, data, IoT and other maturity journeys.
This approach helps partners launch or beef up their strategy and consulting practices, in addition to their standard tech sales. The challenge with any technology is making sure workloads reside in the right places and promote business outcomes. To help achieve that, TD Synnex is talking up its Solutions Catalog. That resource gives partners guidance into the components, talk tracks, validated platforms and more, to combine to meet specific customer needs.
On the next slide, learn about Click to Run and why the solution series matters.
The distributor also offers Click to Run solutions, which don’t cost anything. (These have been available since early 2019, but a lot of TD Synnex partners don’t seem to know about them.) For example, a Microsoft Azure virtual desktop takes 15 minutes to deploy — rather than days — when using the TD Synnex Click to Run capability, Criado said.
Plus, using Click to Run drives end users’ cloud consumption, Criado said. That translates into more licensing, hardware and services opportunities for partners. Click to Run only works with Amazon Web Services and Azure for now — Google Cloud is forthcoming.
When it comes to channel challenges, Criado says partners continue to learn how to ensure cloud security due to the industry-standard “shared responsibility” model.
“We help our partners navigate that complexity,” he said. “It’s not clear for partners or their end customers,” he added.
On the data side, a major challenge to watch for applies to egress fees. This is the money a cloud provider charges when a customer removes data from the cloud. In many cases, the costs are enormous.
“We’re continually trying to have the best line card in the industry,” Criado said. “We’re talking with new vendors where there’s zero or very inexpensive egress fees.”
Cloudify this week took the wraps off its new partner program.
The company targets system integrators that develop applications for customers and who are trying to simplify clients’ cloud environments. Cloudify does this through its so-called environment-as-a-service technology. In essence, the Cloudify platform helps SIs get to market faster than if they were to create a similar approach in-house.
As such, Cloudify’s partner program features a self-service portal with co-marketing, how-tos and other materials. All SIs start at the same tier and then move up as they sell more. Discounts all correlate to tier level (there are four), license value and number of licenses sold, Roy Klein, director of product marketing and strategic alliances at Cloudify, told Channel Futures.
And because Cloudify’s platform helps SIs support new DevOps tools, partners can take advantage of the opportunity to build their professional services businesses, Klein said.
“We give system integrators the ability to provide best practices in a cloud environment,” he said.
Ariel Dan, CEO of Cloudify, agreed.
“Organizations that rely on the cloud are looking for ways to enable their development, production and security teams to manage operations through one platform, and system integrators are under pressure to deliver a solution,” Dan said. “Cloudify is the platform integrators need to deliver the solution their customers want. Through our new partner program, integrators can easily access and deploy Cloudify for their customers and essentially hyperscale their cloud orchestration and automation capabilities.”
Now for something a bit more operator-centric, although more partners these days are taking on provider roles, too.
On Oct. 5, Oracle released its Network Analytics Suite. The first offering in that umbrella product pertains to 5G. It’s called the Oracle Communications Network Data Analytics Function. That’s a big phrase for saying that operators (which, again, can be channel partners) now have a tool for spotting problems before they lead to what Oracle called “catastrophic” network failures.
“Driving innovation with insights from trusted data and enriched analytics is not only critical to compete in today’s marketplace, but game-changing in the way service providers can achieve greater cost efficiency, improve quality of service, and carve out new revenue streams,” said Andrew Morawski, senior vice president and general manager for Oracle Communications, Networks.
Go to the next slide for more details.
Oracle built the new repository on Cloud-Native Computing Foundation principles. And if you’re feeling engineer-y, you’ll be glad to know it also supports 3GPP standards. Similarly, for the arcane technical details, know this: The Network Data Analytics Function is a containerized microservices-based architecture and managed by Kubernetes. It aggregates historical and real-time data such as control-signaling measurements, the state of network functions, congestion, and quality of service in one dashboard. Service providers can even tack on their own automation so they can monitor and audit various software. Oracle used open standards to create the Network Data Analytics Function.
“Building a competitive advantage requires not only effective operations management, but advanced insight concerning network behavior,” said Karl Whitelock, research vice president of Communications Service Provider Operations and Monetization at IDC. “To access enterprise-driven business opportunities, and to create value within new industries goes well beyond traditional connectivity services. Network-level analytics must play a heavy role in addressing customer-defined solution needs.”
“Observability” is a big deal in the cloud world. Basically, it allows organizations to turn data into actionable insights. But to do this efficiently, organizations need the right tools. We say “efficiently” because observability is already doable — after users access a bunch of different portals and compile data from disparate sources so they can reach a point of decision-making.
More vendors understand those hurdles and are finding ways to fix them. ServiceNow, for its part, just bought Era Software for that very purpose. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. ServiceNow will combine Era Software with its Lightstep division. ServiceNow bought Lightstep in 2021 for its unified telemetry technology.
“The Era Software acquisition allows us to pull log data into the new world of modern observability,” wrote Ben Sigelman, co-founder and CEO of Lightstep, in an Oct. 5 blog.
Consultancy giant Deloitte has purchased SFL Scientific for its artificial intelligence and data science capabilities.
Deloitte says it will serve public- and private-sector clients looking to transform their businesses.
“As our clients advance their enterprise AI journeys, they require the comprehensive and sophisticated experience that SFL Scientific delivers,” said Dan Helfrich, chairman and CEO of Deloitte. “The acquisition builds on an already strong relationship between our two organizations serving both commercial and public sector clients. Additionally, it will help us advise clients with the best approach to how AI can help transform their business, implement scalable capabilities to drive that transformation, and provide ongoing support to continually improve investments with AI-infused tech.”
Fresh on the heels of its announcement about a data center region in Greece, Google Cloud is now expanding to Africa, too. (Hence our terrible Toto reference. Apologies, Toto.)
The world’s third-largest public cloud provider is a little behind the game, though — Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure already have data centers in the same region. Azure got there first, in 2019; AWS launched there in 2020. Oracle went live in Johannesburg this year.
Google Cloud will head to South Africa first, before likely expanding to other parts of the continent. Research commissioned by the company and conducted by AlphaBeta Economics indicates that South Africa is growing in importance among cloud providers. AlphaBeta found that Google Cloud’s region there will contribute more than $2 billion to the country’s gross domestic product and create more than 40,000 jobs by 2030.
Google Cloud told TechCrunch it’s looking to localize applications and services. As more governments crack down on where data may reside — and as organizations seek to protect sensitive information — end users will have more choices for doing just that.
Cloud companies are fueling the growth of the colocation market. So are enterprises pushing more of their IT infrastructure off-premises.
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that, as of the second quarter, six colo providers now account for 37% of the market, thanks to demand from cloud and internet firms. Equinix, Digital Realty, NTT, CyrusOne, DigitalBridge and KDDI lead the charge.
Operators from China follow with 13% market share. Combined, colo providers from the United States and China account for almost half of the world’s totals, according to Synergy. Vendors from Japan, the U.K., Germany, Singapore and India are next.
“The competitive landscape is a mixture of a small number of companies [that] are building a global footprint and a large number of national or regional specialists,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT continue to expand globally by a combination of organic growth and by some aggressive M&A activity, but theirs is not the only path forward. Smaller data center companies can also build growing and sustainable operations by focusing on specific countries or geographic regions.”
Cloud companies are fueling the growth of the colocation market. So are enterprises pushing more of their IT infrastructure off-premises.
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that, as of the second quarter, six colo providers now account for 37% of the market, thanks to demand from cloud and internet firms. Equinix, Digital Realty, NTT, CyrusOne, DigitalBridge and KDDI lead the charge.
Operators from China follow with 13% market share. Combined, colo providers from the United States and China account for almost half of the world’s totals, according to Synergy. Vendors from Japan, the U.K., Germany, Singapore and India are next.
“The competitive landscape is a mixture of a small number of companies [that] are building a global footprint and a large number of national or regional specialists,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT continue to expand globally by a combination of organic growth and by some aggressive M&A activity, but theirs is not the only path forward. Smaller data center companies can also build growing and sustainable operations by focusing on specific countries or geographic regions.”
It’s only the middle of the week and already we’ve got a hefty cloud news roundup for you. Let’s start with a look at the golden parachute packages Rackspace Technology is extending to its incoming and outgoing CEOs. By now readers know that Amar Maletira has replaced Kevin Jones, marking the giant MSP’s fifth CEO since 2016. Jones exits with an enviable golden parachute, while Maletira looks set for an even bigger one down the road.
After that, find out what the head of TD Synnex’s cloud, data and IoT group has to say about the company’s Inspire event this week. Franciso Criado also shares some strategic insight about how partners can profit more through some of the distributor’s offerings.
From there we take a look at Cloudify and its new partner program. DevOps-centric partners will likely be interested in that. Next, Oracle has a new platform that targets 5G, where more channel partners are dabbling. Get the scoop on the data and analytics capabilities there to prevent “catastrophic” network failure.
Then, we present two new acquisitions this week — one at ServiceNow, one at Deloitte. And, with apologies to Toto and all pop culture aficionados, we talk about where Google Cloud is launching a new data center region. Finally, we wrap up with some compelling stats on the colocation market.
See the slideshow above to kick off with the details on the two Rackspace executives’ golden parachutes. These gents should be enjoying smooth sailing.
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