Rackspace today announced it’s expanding its managed service portfolio to include support for the Google Cloud Platform. Until now, the company only supported clients who wanted to use Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or OpenStack cloud. Now, Google and Rackspace are collaborating on the new managed services offering, which is scheduled to launch later this year (with the exact date unknown).
The new offering will provide clients the usual range of managed services, from basic cloud architecture support to onboarding, data migration and ongoing operational support. The basic idea here is to let Rackspace manage your public cloud deployments — something that’s often easier and more cost-effective for many companies than hiring their own staff to operate their clouds.
Whenever I asked the company about possibly supporting the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the answer was usually that there simply wasn’t enough demand from its clients. Now that Google is stepping up its cloud game, though, that’s clearly changing. Indeed, in its announcement, Rackspace cites a report from 451 Research that shows that the adoption of GCP almost doubled over the course of the last year.
“The momentum around GCP is building, and as businesses move workloads to this platform, they’re looking for expertise and a support partner to help with that journey,” Rackspace’s GM for its Google business Patrick Lee said in today’s announcement. “By providing Fanatical Support for Google Cloud, we will be able to help deliver value to joint customers and help them meet their evolving business needs.”
While Google’s reputation in the cloud business is quickly changing, the company was never known for providing great support — especially at the level that many enterprises expect. Google, which is trying to make up some of the ground it lost to AWS and Azure over the last few years, will now be able to refer its customers to Rackspace’s managed services.