Rackspace Turns To Google Cloud Platform For Managed Services Support

Rackspace will become the first managed services support partner for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with the two companies collaborating on a new managed services offering set to launch later this year.

“The strategic relationship with Google is an exciting launch that addresses a growing market need,” said Patrick Lee, general manager of the Google business at Rackspace. “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.

“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.”

Google support

The services will offer GCP customers cloud architecture support, onboarding, data migration expertise and ongoing operational support.

Previously, Rackspace only covered Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or OpenStack cloud, but has made the leap to GCP as its adoption has continued to increase, citing a 451 Research report which says adoption has nearly doubled over the last 12 months.

“Rackspace’s commitment to providing results-obsessed customer service mirrors Google’s commitment to customer support,” said Benjamin Smith, director of engineering support, Google Cloud.

“We’re working with Rackspace to extend on-call engineering support to our shared customers. Rackspace already has Google Certified Professionals on staff, and we will continue to work together to roll out managed services for GCP.”

This news follows on from Slack’s recent announcement that it is deepening its integration with Google Cloud and SAP becoming a strategic cloud partnership for the development of enterprise applications.

Google is pushing its cloud platform hard at the moment, in an effort to keep pace with its main competitors Amazon and Microsoft. AWS has continued to grow at a rapid rate, while Azure has recently strengthened its cloud grip in government.