Rackspace Preps Remote Monitoring, Managed Services Business

Rackspace, the hosting and cloud services provider, is preparing to launch a remote monitoring service — which will apparently monitor customers’ on-premises servers. Andrew Schroepfer, VP of enterprise strategy at Rackspace, mentioned the potential managed services move during the CA Technologies MSP Symposium today in Miami, Fla.

“Only about 10 percent of all IT is located in a third-party facility,” said Schroepfer, apparently suggesting that 90 percent of IT remains on-premises. “We’d like to have that other 90 percent.”

Still Schroepfer was not suggesting that Rackspace will go after the entire on-premises managed services market. Instead, initial Rackspace remote monitoring customers will involve specific IT platforms — such as Dell running the Citrix Xen Hyporvisor.

Without mentioning too many details about the forthcoming remote monitoring service, Schroepfer spoke highly of CA Technology’s remote monitoring and management tools. It begged the question: Is Rackspace preparing a business that leverages Nimsoft, the remote monitoring platform that CA acquired more than a year ago?

I’m not sure. But it sounds like one of the first Rackspace managed services customers will be X.commerce, which is a new business from eBay. And it sounds like much of the Rackspace managed services effort will focus on OpenStack-centric customers.

For MSPs serving the SMB market, I don’t think Rackspace’s remote monitoring services will reach that low into that market. But that’s just an educated guess — for now.