Rackspace Names President of Private Cloud in Latest Leadership Shuffle

Rackspace announced on Thursday that it has named David Meredith president of private cloud and managed hosting, effective immediately. Meredith is the second appointment Rackspace has made in as many weeks after naming Joe Eazor CEO at the end of May.

According to Rackspace, Meredith will lead the largest revenue-driving business at Rackspace, its single-tenant business, with the goal of growth through investments and product strategy. He will report to Eazor, whose official start date is June 12.

Prior to Rackspace, Meredith served as president of global data centers at CenturyLink. Previously, he held various leadership roles in international managed hosting businesses.

“As a pioneer in the managed hosting business, Rackspace is strongly positioned to succeed in a market where businesses want help moving out of their legacy data centers so they can be more strategic in their IT operations,” Meredith said in a statement. “I’m pleased to be joining the Rackspace team at such an exciting time in the company’s history, and in the industry overall. I look forward to locking arms with teams across the business to deliver managed hosting and single-tenant solutions to customers in a way that is efficient, strategic and provides the highest value Fanatical Support®.”

Meredith will take over partial responsibilities from Mark Roenigk, COO at Rackspace, who is leaving the company at the end of June after an eight-year tenure with the company. 

“We are excited to have someone with David’s experience joining our team,” Jeff Cotten, president and interim CEO at Rackspace said in a statement. “Rackspace helped invent the managed hosting business in the late 1990s, and it has remained the largest portion of our business to-date. By strengthening our leadership position in this space, we can gain the business of enterprises that are increasingly outsourcing workloads they don’t want to re-architect for the public cloud. David will work closely with our marketing, sales and support functions to accelerate growth in this business. I am confident that David is the right person to lead this charge, and he will be a valuable addition to the company and our leadership team.”

“I’d also like to thank Mark Roenigk for his eight years of service to this company,” Cotten said. “Mark has embodied servant leadership for an entire generation of Rackers and has been integral in building and elevating Rackspace strategy around digital security, corporate social responsibility, open computing and operational excellence. We wish him the best moving forward.”

After a strong focus on investing in Rackspace’s managed cloud business, it will be interesting to watch how its private cloud and hosting business will evolve under Meredith’s leadership.