Snack Company Graze among First UK Businesses to Benefit from Rackspace Fanatical Support for AWS
London, UK – 3 February, 2016 - Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, today announced the general availability of Fanatical Support® for Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) in all markets outside of the U.S., where it has been available since October 2015. Healthy snack provider Graze® is one of the first companies in the UK to take advantage of the new offering after updating its IT infrastructure and selecting a managed cloud provider.
Fanatical Support for AWS provides tools, expertise, application management, and operational support to customers on the AWS Cloud. It was initially announced at the AWS Re:Invent event in October 2015. Since then, Rackspace has already trained or recruited an expert team of certified AWS engineers and architects acquiring more than 200 technical certifications.
Graze is a long-term AWS customer and signed up for Fanatical Support for AWS in January 2016. The British company was launched in 2009 by seven friends who wanted to offer busy people tastier, healthier snacks. The group went on to create an eCommerce business that delivers Graze boxes (packages containing a variety of healthy snacks), to a convenient location for the customer – often their workplace. The business has grown rapidly ever since and successfully expanded into the U.S. market in 2013.
The company’s IT team decided to re-architect the solution so it could achieve a high level of scalability and resilience, while reducing the in-house resource required to run the infrastructure. Rackspace’s established reputation for providing first-class support and expertise was a primary consideration for Graze, who evaluated the capabilities of several managed service providers. Working with Rackspace, Graze is now able to focus the internal team’s time on tasks that deliver value to the business and contribute towards its ambitions of using technology to become the world’s number one healthy snack brand.
Tom Percival, CIO of Graze, said: “We needed to considerably reduce the amount of in-house man hours spent maintaining our IT infrastructure and by adopting Fanatical Support® for AWS we are looking forward to our IT team being able to focus on tasks that drive business value. We also expect to drive great developer efficiency due to the extensive roadmap of infrastructure improvements we'll be working on collaboratively.”
James Cowe, Director of AWS Strategy & Architecture at Rackspace, said: “Fanatical Support for AWS is an attractive option for a successful and expanding business like Graze, which needs to focus its resources on delivering value to the company rather than managing increasingly complex layers of technology. Many of the CIOs we speak to are finding it tough to justify having to spend precious budget on growing the internal IT team to provide the amount of man power and skills needed to run technology effectively. That’s where managed cloud services like Fanatical Support for AWS can really help firms to reduce the overall cost and time spent maintaining IT infrastructure.”
More details about the new service
Rackspace has become an Amazon Web Services (AWS) authorised reseller, undergone 3rd party audit to become an AWS Managed Services Partner and joined the AWS Partner Network at the Advanced Consulting Partner level.
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the challenge and expense of managing complex IT infrastructure and application platforms on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialised expertise on top of leading technologies developed by AWS, Microsoft, OpenStack, VMware and others, through a results-obsessed service known as Fanatical Support®. The company has more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including two-thirds of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, and has been honoured within the top 100 Great Places to Work for the past 11 years. Learn more at www.rackspace.co.uk
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with Fanatical Support for AWS; anticipated operational and financial benefits from Fanatical Support for AWS; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include including the possibility that expected benefits from Fanatical Support for AWS may not materialize because this product is not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the product cost effectively, differentiate the product from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the product, (iii) changes in technology which adversely effect the product’s benefit, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the product, and (vi) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2015 filed with the SEC on November 9, 2015. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
