Rackspace Unveils End-to-End SharePoint Services Portfolio

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is finally making a move to build out its SharePoint services — a company announcement that has been forthcoming for most of this year, ever since Rackspace acquired SharePoint911, a provider of Microsoft SharePoint consulting, training and quick-start services, back in February.

As a professional services provider that wrapped its business (and its company name) around SharePoint, SharePoint911 complemented Rackspace's own hosted SharePoint offerings well, but it has been months of silence since the acquisition was announced. Now, Rackspace is moving forward to offering more of a SharePoint one-stop shop for its customers.

The new services portfolio provides customers with design, development, support and training services based around Rackspace's hosted and cloud SharePoint services. In its announcement, Rackspace busted out the "trusted advisor" moniker when describing customer's needs in a SharePoint provider. It's true that plenty of customers could use a simplified and easy-to-access set of services to keep their hosted SharePoint services running efficiently, but will this have much to do with the channel, the traditional trusted advisor for customers? Time will tell.

Rackspace unveiled the new service portfolio at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference, where it is demonstrating all of the company's SharePoint capabilities.

"Since the early days of our SharePoint offering in 2008, we have worked closely with customers, designing, building and supporting complex,  production scale SharePoint solutions for their businesses," said Jeff DeVerter, director of SharePoint support at Rackspace, in a prepared statement. "Our end-to-end service model extends Fanatical Support for SharePoint, providing application layer support and professional services to help businesses better utilize SharePoint within their organization."

Rackspace Services for SharePoint includes various features and capabilities, including:

• Full support of enterprise class infrastructure that allows customers to focus on using SharePoint instead of maintaining the underlying environment.
• Application level and administrative support like installation and configuration, site collection and creation, maintenance, monitoring, and backup and restore.
• Professional services around customization, administration and training delivered by SharePoint MVP and MCM experts to help businesses design solutions tailored to meet specific their needs and increase user adoption.
• An SLA that includes 100 percent power and network, and 365/24/7 support.