On July 13, Rackspace and Microsoft announced a partnership whereby Rackspace will include Microsoft Azure within the purview of its legendary fanatical support qua professional services. Rackspace will help Azure customers optimize their Azure deployments by minimizing costs, optimizing performance and providing consultative support regarding infrastructure and application architecture, deployment and ongoing configuration and monitoring. In addition to delivering its professional services arm to Azure customers, Rackspace will offer hybrid cloud solutions that combine the Rackspace private cloud, hosted on the Microsoft Cloud Platform, featuring Azure. The availability of Rackspace’s professional services for the Azure cloud represents a huge coup for both Rackspace and Microsoft. Having struggled to keep pace with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace’s partnership with Microsoft positions it strongly to command a leadership position in the market for professional services for cloud products and services. Meanwhile, Microsoft stands to gain from Rackspace’s reputation for impeccable support and managed services that builds on Rackspace’s deep expertise with Microsoft technologies.
Within the larger context of the industry, the Rackspace-Microsoft partnership promises to tilt the momentum for IaaS-focused cloud services toward Microsoft and away from Amazon Web Services because of Rackspace’s venerable reputation for cloud-related professional services. By tapping into Rackspace’s sweet spot for fanatical support, Microsoft gives its customers the option of leveraging a professional services partner with impeccable IaaS, private cloud and managed cloud solutions credentials. All this means that Azure enterprise customers need no longer depend on internal cloud resources for their deployments but can rather reap the benefits of Rackspace consultants to accelerate the timeline for their deployments while expanding scope and complexity as needed. The deal between Rackspace and Microsoft illustrates one of the ways in which CEO Satya Nadella’s cloud experience is bearing fruit for Microsoft given its success in implementing an array of impressive partnerships that render the Azure platform open to an increasingly impressive roster of technologies and vendors. As such, the collaboration with Rackspace adds a notable feather to Microsoft’s cap that further distinguishes Azure not only from Amazon Web Services but also from the Google Cloud Platform.
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