Rackspace CEO: A Letter to Our Customers Announcing Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure

Rackspace President and CEO Taylor Rhodes sent this letter to our customers who consume Microsoft products this morning:

To our amazing customers,

Our strategy, from the time Rackspace was founded, has been to differentiate ourselves and create value for you in two major ways. First, we strive to be the customer service leader in our industry, providing the world’s best expertise and service from smart and caring Rackers. This is what we call Fanatical Support®.

Additionally, we offer you the choice of leading technologies and platforms. This “technology agnostic” approach enables us to update our offerings and help you adopt new capabilities as products and platforms evolve. It also further aligns us with you, because we are free to give objective guidance based on the best solution available for the mission you need to accomplish.

Fanatical Support and technology choice form the foundation of our managed cloud leadership position.

Taking the next step with Fanatical Support® for Microsoft® Azure™.

Today, we proudly launched Fanatical Support for Azure, a public cloud platform that’s becoming increasingly popular with enterprises.

Azure is powerful, but like all cloud technologies, it can be complex and is constantly evolving. Our hundreds of Microsoft certified professionals can help you deploy applications on Azure faster, tap its potential to the fullest and do so at a lower total cost than if you hired the technical talent to manage it yourself.

We’ve launched this new offering effective today for U.S. customers (supporting Azure deployments in data centers around the globe), and we expect to roll it out to other regions over the rest of this year and through early 2016.

Expanding our heritage as the world’s leading Microsoft service provider.

Fanatical Support for Azure marks an important expansion of our strategy to offer you the world’s best expertise and service on industry-leading technologies. It is also a natural evolution of our longstanding relationship with Microsoft. That relationship began 13 years ago when we started providing expertise and support for customers running Microsoft Windows and Windows Web Server (IIS). We then added Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Microsoft Private Cloud and recently Office 365. Today, we’re one of the world’s leaders in expertise and service for each of these technologies.

Our Microsoft certified professionals work closely with customers and also with Microsoft, to pass along what we learn from our hands-on work to help Microsoft refine and improve its products. That’s one reason we were again named Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2015 — for a record fifth time.

We can help you architect and deploy the platform in a way that’s tailored to your unique needs and preferences. We will proactively monitor your VMs and devices, patch on request and troubleshoot. We will be available to you by phone or ticket, 24/7 — within minutes. We won’t send you to FAQs or message boards for support. We will be there for your team, backing you up with Fanatical Support.

It’s a multi-cloud world, and Fanatical Support is ready for it.

The addition of Fanatical Support for Azure to our existing service portfolio recognizes what we’re hearing from our customers — that they’re choosing the best platform or technology for their individual needs and workloads, and they want us to support them on multiple clouds.

As the #1 managed cloud company, we’re simplifying adoption, helping manage risk and managing the leading platforms our customers choose, whether it’s Azure, OpenStack, VMware or a hybrid solution that combines public cloud, private cloud, dedicated and bare-metal servers.

Our strategy also provides us with the opportunity to introduce Fanatical Support on other industry-leading cloud platforms in the future. We specialize in developing teams of certified technical experts who can help you run your choice of cloud platform. Stay tuned…

We are confident today’s news will add significant value for your businesses, whether you’re already using Azure or are considering it for your next application. To learn more, reach out to your Rackspace team or visit www.rackspace.com/azure.

Sincerely,

Taylor Rhodes

President and CEO

Rackspace