Rackspace Inks Strategic Partnership with Google Cloud Platform

Rackspace has become the first managed services support partner for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The companies will launch a new managed services offering later this year.

The new strategic partnership was announced on Wednesday, and will provide GCP customers with added cloud infrastructure support, onboarding, data migration expertise, and ongoing operational support for optimal cloud application performance.

“The strategic relationship with Google is an exciting launch that addresses a growing market need,” Patrick Lee, general manager of the Google business at Rackspace said in a statement. “The momentum around GCP is building, and as businesses move workloads to this platform, they’re looking for expertise and a support partner to help with that journey. By providing Fanatical Support for Google Cloud, we will be able to help deliver value to joint customers and help them meet their evolving business needs.”

Increasing multi-cloud adoption has driven Google Cloud adoption to nearly double over the past year, according to 451 Research.

“The partnership between Rackspace and Google is a natural fit,” Michelle Bailey, chief research officer, 451 Research said. “Both companies have strong technical capabilities and the pairing of Rackspace’s strong service culture with Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) practice is an important step forward in providing enterprise-ready customer support capabilities on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We continue to see rising adoption of GCP globally, so there is real value to Rackspace in being the first to market with this type of managed services partnership that seeks to bring cloud-native capabilities to traditional enterprise customers and business-critical applications.”

Rackspace’s managed cloud portfolio also includes support for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and VMware, in addition to dedicated servers.

Rackspace cut 275 from its U.S. workforce in February as it seeks to to reduce its operating expenses by $100 million, but the company still expects its workforce to grow over the next several years. Its managed services, meanwhile, have continued to post strong growth.

Google also made a series of announcements Tuesday expanding its cloud partner program.