Rackspace Brings Signature Fanatical Support to AWS

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Rackspace announced the launch of its anticipated AWS managed services offerings Tuesday at AWS re:Invent. A post on the official Rackspace blog accompanying the announcement asked the obvious question: Why is Rackspace supporting Amazon Web Services?

The short answer is “customer demand,” and it was addressed by Rackspace and CEO Taylor Rhodes in August, when the company confirmed rumors that the partnership was in development. At the time, Rhodes cited slower than hoped for growth in Rackspace’s public cloud products. Fanatical Support services, however, have remained strong.

“We have been with Rackspace since 2004 and the company has a proven reputation of delivering the highest level of customer support,” said Jonathan Issler, Director of Operational Technology at Infosnap. “We have some workloads that run on AWS as well and we’ve researched other companies that could potentially provide support for this platform, but none were a good fit. When Rackspace approached us about its Fanatical Support for AWS offering, we signed immediately based on the strength of their managed cloud experience and expertise.”

Competing directly with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure makes continually less sense (and money), and Rackspace’s core business has been evolving towards managed services. It began offering managed Azure services last November.

The initial Rackspace AWS services launched at re:Invent are Fanatical Support for AWS, Rackspace Managed Security and Compliance Assistance for AWS, and Rackspace Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager.

“Our mission is to provide best-of-breed customer service and expertise on top of the world’s leading technologies, and we see substantial demand from customers who want to leverage AWS for mission critical applications,” said Chris Cochran, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Rackspace. “Launching our new business unit and adding AWS support to our portfolio of managed service offerings enables us to give our customers more choice in their infrastructure deployments.”

Fanatical Support for AWS is divided into “Navigator,” which provides Rackspace tools and expertise, and a fully managed offering called “Aviator.” Both are currently available to US customers and in beta for non-US customers, except for AWS China and US GovCloud regions. Both Rackspace Managed Security and Compliance Assistance for AWS are available in beta for Fanatical Support for AWS customers. Rackspace Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager provides a managed automation platform on AWS to reduce the complexity associated with Experience Manager. It is now available in three AWS regions in the US.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-brings-signature-fanatical-support-to-aws