PRESS RELEASE — SAN ANTONIO – March 8, 2017 – Rackspace^® today announced a strategic relationship with Google Cloud to become its first managed services support partner for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google Cloud and Rackspace are collaborating on a new managed services offering for Google Cloud Platform customers that will launch later this year.

The managed support services will offer GCP customers added cloud architecture support, onboarding, data migration expertise, as well as ongoing operational support for customers, to help ensure optimal cloud application performance.

As multi-cloud adoption increases, more businesses are moving to Google Cloud Platform to run critical workloads. According to 451 Research, the adoption of Google Cloud has nearly doubled over the past year.

“The strategic relationship with Google is an exciting launch that addresses a growing market need,” said Patrick Lee, general manager of the Google business at Rackspace. “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.”{ad}

“Rackspace’s commitment to providing results-obsessed customer service mirrors Google’s commitment to customer support,” said Benjamin Smith, director, Engineering Support, Google Cloud. “We’re working with Rackspace to extend on-call engineering support to our shared customers. Rackspace already has Google Certified Professionals on staff, and we will continue to work together to roll out managed services for GCP.”

“The partnership between Rackspace and Google is a natural fit,” said Michelle Bailey, chief research officer, 451 Research. “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.”

ghd is a top manufacturer of premium hair products, and long-time Rackspace customer:

“As a leading innovator in hair products, it is essential that ghd constantly evolves to meet the demands of our customers,” said Spencer Hudson, global technical solutions manager, ghd. “We’re hair experts not cloud experts, so for more than 11 years we have partnered with and relied on Rackspace’s expertise. Now, with an eye to the future, we are looking at the Google Cloud Platform. Knowing that Rackspace will be available to support us means we can rest assured that while Rackspace focuses on managing our cloud infrastructure, we can concentrate on ghd’s continuous product innovation and delivering great digital experiences to our customers.”

To learn more about the partnership and register to receive information on the beta program, please visit: www.rackspace.com/managed-google-cloud.

About Rackspace
Rackspace, the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it all on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies including AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenStack and VMware. The company serves customers in 150 countries, including more than half of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, and has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, and others as one of the best companies to work for. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.