Gartner Positions Rackspace in the "Leaders" Quadr

SAN ANTONIO, TX --(Marketwired - March 16, 2017) - Rackspace ^® today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the "Leaders" quadrant of its new Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide.

The Gartner assessment, performed by the firm's IT industry experts, evaluates providers based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to execute. It categorizes providers in quadrants labeled Niche Players, Challengers, Visionaries and Leaders. Rackspace was among the 20 providers assessed by Gartner, and Rackspace is one of seven in the Leaders quadrant.

"We believe earning a position as a leader in the first year of this new Magic Quadrant is an honor," said Jeff Cotten, president of Rackspace. "We launched our initial managed services offerings for AWS and Microsoft Azure in the back half of 2015 and feel this recognition by Gartner is a testament to how far we've come in a relatively short time. Customers value the technical expertise, software tooling and global scale we bring to the managed services market. We are fortunate to be the only managed cloud services provider that is recognized at the highest tiers of the partner programs of AWS, Google and Microsoft. We're experiencing strong growth in our managed cloud services for the leading pubic clouds and expect that trend to continue as we innovate on our products."

Over the past two years, Rackspace has brought its results-obsessed approach to customer service, known as Fanatical Support ^® , to multiple public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft ^® Azure ^® and, just recently, Google ^® Cloud Platform.

Rackspace is investing heavily in its Fanatical Support for AWS and Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure businesses. Rackspace has more than 700 customers on these platforms and each business is experiencing a four-figure annualized growth rate.

Rackspace recently achieved Premier Consulting Partner status, the highest tier within the AWS Partner Network, and the Fanatical Support for AWS global team of experts holds nearly 800 technical certifications, which earned it the highest-level certification distinction from AWS. In response to customers' needs, Rackspace is investing heavily in its Fanatical Support for AWS tooling, and is now able to offer customers an enhanced version of the Compass tool that provides valuable data to help them optimize their AWS spending. The enhanced Compass tool gives customers insights into their AWS spending trends, opportunities to right-size under-utilized resources, recommendations for Reserved Instance purchases, and the ability to aggregate and analyze spending across multiple dimensions and multiple AWS accounts.

In addition, Rackspace recently achieved 10 Microsoft Partner Competencies, doubling the number it secured the previous year, for its proven expertise in delivering quality solutions across specialized areas of business. This Microsoft expertise is delivered by hundreds of Rackers across the globe who have earned more than 1,000 technical certifications and an additional 800 sales and licensing certifications. Rackspace ranks in the top tier of Microsoft's global competency partners. Rackspace continues to invest in product enhancements to more proactively support Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure customers. These include recent updates to help customers more easily deploy via self-service templates, along with a new Logbook feature that provides customers with improved security reporting for Azure infrastructure, and monitoring enhancements that deliver real-time visibility into the status of critical Azure services.

Last week, Rackspace announced a strategic collaboration with Google, in which the two companies will work to bring Fanatical Support to Google Cloud Platform customers in 2017. This new offering completes Rackspace's managed cloud portfolio for hyperscale public clouds.

For more information on Rackspace's position as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant forPublic Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide, please view the full report at www.rackspace.com/about/magic-quadrant-leader .

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 or other designation. 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.

About Rackspace

Rackspace, the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies including AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenStack, VMware and others. The company serves customers in 150 countries, including more than half of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, and others as one of the best companies to work for. Learn more at www.rackspace.com .