Tag: managed cloud services

Rackspace and Datapipe Take Leadership Positions In Gartner Magic Quadrant For Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, North America

Datapipe and Rackspace take the two leadership positions in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, North America as illustrated below. Datapipe offers fully managed hosting solutions on Amazon Web Services in addition to private cloud and hybrid cloud solutions. Rackspace, meanwhile, recently introduced a managed cloud service that builds upon its branding for “fanatical support” by delivering managed infrastructure and managed operations solutions. CenturyLink was also positioned strongly as a visionary with a strong ability to execute. Managed hosting solutions are likely to play a critical role in the next phase of the evolution of IaaS adoption as organizations increasingly strive to simplify and streamline IaaS adoption by transferring responsibility for provisioning, managing and troubleshooting IaaS environments to vendors who specialize in managed cloud solution delivery.

Source: http://go.datapipe.com/gartner_cloud_enabled_magic_quadrant_2014

Disclaimer: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Datapipe here or Rackspace here. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Rackspace Announces Managed Cloud Services, But Is It Enough?

Rackspace recently announced details of a managed cloud service plan that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of managed services for their cloud deployments. The managed cloud service plan comes in two forms: (1) managed infrastructure, which provides advisory services regarding infrastructure set-up and architecture; and (2) managed operations, which enables Rackspace engineers to access customer servers to tweak code as necessary. The managed infrastructure and operations offerings represent Rackspace’s attempt to differentiate itself from competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure, both of which demand greater responsibility on the part of developers and IT staff to provision, configure, deploy and manage Infrastructure as a Service environments. The introduction of the managed cloud service pivots on Rackspace’s famed “fanatical support” by building on the company’s strengths as a leader in consultative support for IaaS deployment and management. Rackspace President Taylor Rhodes summarized the new managed cloud offerings as follows:

Our basic level, called Managed Infrastructure, offers Fanatical Support with much more managed service than do the more-expensive, premium service levels offered by many of our competitors. Our higher service level, called Managed Operations, provides even more managed services, up the stack into the support of application level — addressing customer needs that most of our rivals won’t even touch.

Components of the managed infrastructure offering include architectural advice, support for workload migration and scaling, launch assistance and round the clock availability of cloud engineers to troubleshoot and resolve issues. Managed operations additionally delivers support for operating systems, web servers, database servers, cloud databases, cloud backup and monitoring and user provisioning and permissions. Rackspace’s managed infrastructure offering is priced at $.005/GB, assuming a $50 minimum per month while managed operations is priced at $.02/GB, with a $500 monthly minimum. In addition to its managed cloud service, Rackspace announced details of an expanded program for developers and more transparent pricing. Altogether, Rackspace’s new managed cloud offering is likely to give it some short term publicity and inject new life into its ailing IaaS positioning, but the San Antonio-based company will need a deeper transformation if it intends to seriously compete with the big players in the IaaS space, particularly given that competitors such as Amazon Web Services already partner with other vendors to offer managed services comparable to those revealed by Rackspace last Tuesday.