Rackspace Launches Application Operations Service

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Rackspace has launched a new Application Operations service to provide expertise, performance insights, and optimization for customers' websites and applications, the company announced Tuesday.

Managing cloud-based applications is challenging for many organizations due to growing complexity and a lack of in-house expertise, Rackspace says. The company also points out that 61 percent of enterprise IT and business-oriented Application Performance Monitoring technology users told Gartner in a recent study that the tool is important or critically important to business operations.

See also: Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes Leaving Company

Rackspace Application Services (RAS) is a suite of advanced application-support offerings, which replaces the company's Managed Application Services.

"Unplanned downtime for mission and non-mission critical applications are costing companies more than $11 million per year on average," said Brannon Lacey, vice president and general manager of applications and platforms at Rackspace. "This represents a massive hit to their bottom line and it's disruptive to their business. With our Application Operations offering, we're helping to solve this challenge and will help enable our customers to focus more on innovation and advancing their business priorities by leaving the application management and support to our experienced experts."

Management and support services provided by RAS include application and system architecture consultation, application performance analysis, and a production platform uptime guarantee. The service is offered as two options, one to support custom Java and .NET applications, and one for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Sitecore Experience Platform, Oracle Commerce and SAP Hybris.

Rackspace appointed Jeff Cotten interim CEO to replace Taylor Rhodes, and also announced a partnership with Dell EMC to simplify private cloud adoption at the OpenStack Summit earlier in May.