What Will Differentiate Rackspace In the Channel?
June 17, 2011
By samdizzy
Rackspace Hosting continues to achieve new business milestones. The cloud provider earlier this year unified its partner program under one umbrella, making it easier for VARs and MSPs to resell Rackspace’s cloud, hosted and managed offerings. Moreover, Rackspace is marching forward with OpenStack — an open source platform that could accelerate standardized cloud deployments worldwide.
But what will ultimately differentiate Rackspace in the channel? An effective partner program? Intellectual property culled from OpenStack? Actually, the answer if far more basic. Rackspace continues to bet its customer and channel business on two words: Fanatical Support.
Rackers — the term for Rackspace employees — are recruited for “attitude and aptitude.” As of October 2010, the company assigned 2,000 of its 3,000 employees to customer support, Rackspace insiders mentioned during a partner conference. Rackspace’s technical know-how runs deep. A prime example: Rackspace is second only to Red Hat in terms of the number of certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux certified pros it employs.
According to Wall Street Cheat Sheet: