Rackspace–VMware Partnership Forges the Digital Frontier With Multi-cloud Solutions That Deliver Lasting Customer Outcomes
Rackspace Technology is renowned for its multi-cloud expertise. But the company’s passion extends well beyond infrastructure—what truly guides Rackspace is a mission to deliver business outcomes for its customers. As a long-time VMware partner, Rackspace frequently relies on VMware technology to deliver on that mission.
Edward Kerr, senior product manager at Rackspace, says, “VMware is pioneering the future of technology, and as a VMware partner, we’re able to stay on the digital frontier for our customers. We’re able to take VMware technology and help our customer extract value from it to achieve the outcomes they want.”
Today, that means leveraging multi-cloud solutions. Kerr explains, “With multi-cloud, applications can potentially live in any number of places. But the real magic is how you create meaningful experiences from a multi-cloud architecture. Through the VMware cloud-smart ecosystem, we’re able to go beyond clouds and talk less about where workloads live and more about the outcomes a business needs to be successful.”
For example, if the customer’s objective to automate, Rackspace could lead them to VMware Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite) and vCloud Suite to build an automation framework for VMware Cloud. If the customer’s focus is on network security, the answer from Rackspace may be to leverage VMware NSX.
Kerr says, “Rackspace Elastic Engineering for VMware is our outcome-as-a-service offering, which we use when talking to customers about what value they want to extract from their workloads. Maybe they need to strengthen security for their business. The conversation then is not about what cloud to choose, but instead it’s about how they can leverage micro-segmentation to logically divide up their environment at the workload level, then create custom policies for each of those workloads. We would use NSX to deliver that outcome. That’s often the foundation for building the kind of zero-trust architecture our customers in government, finance, healthcare, and other data-sensitive industries require.”
Delivering Customer-focused, Outcome-based Solutions
To illustrate how Rackspace delivers outcome-based solutions for its customers, consider the case of a leading global professional services company that came to the company looking to improve its security posture. This company has multiple divisions, each with different security requirements. When delivering customer solutions, the professional services company was dependent on its supply chain to bring in network infrastructure with the necessary security.
Kerr shares how Rackspace approached the situation: “We employed our professional services and elastic engineering services to take this customer from a physical network infrastructure to a software-defined network. We leveraged VMware NSX and helped the customer use micro-segmentation to customize security and automate policy enforcement on a worldwide basis.”
What was the ultimate outcome? Kerr reports, “By moving to a software-defined network and automating security, the customer eliminated the need to bring infrastructure into a new region and was able to accelerate their delivery time by over 20%.”
Always Looking Forward to Meet Customers’ Evolving Needs
Rackspace also gains additional value as a VMware partner that the company can translate into business outcomes for its customers. For example, Kerr sees the VMware Partner Connect program as a vital resource to support Rackspace’s ongoing growth. “VMware Partner Connect helps us grow by providing us financial resources we can use to elevate the skillsets of our teams and enable them to deliver more complex outcomes for our customers.”
As customer needs evolve, the partnership between Rackspace and VMware will continue to yield exciting new possibilities for businesses around the world. Kerr concludes, “I'm excited about VMware’s multi-cloud roadmap because I believe we need to go beyond the cloud. That is, not seeing cloud as just a destination, but as a means to unlock a variety of valuable outcomes no matter where a customer’s applications live. VMware’s technologies and agnostic approach are exactly what we need to help our customers achieve those outcomes.”
