By Rick Reed and Thomas Baker

2017 has been a big year for Rackspace, which bills itself as the No. 1 managed cloud provider.

The company completed its acquisition of Datapipe earlier this month in a move expected to expand its abilities to help its customers move critical workloads out of their corporate data centers and into the cloud. The integration process already is underway.

The deal, as new channel chief Lisa McLin told us at Channel Partners Evolution this fall, gives partners access to more data centers around the world, as well as a new colocation offering and new opportunities to dive into public-sector sales.

Rackspace also added a new incentive program that matches dollar for dollar deals that new and existing agents generate when selling managed hosting services valued between $10,000 and $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Channel Partners took a tour of Rackspace’s unique headquarters in suburban San Antonio, Texas, earlier this month. Scroll through our image gallery below to see what we learned.