VisitBritain Rides Olympic Waves With SapientNitro and Rackspace
London, UK – 13 March 2012 – Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has announced the successful delivery of VisitBritain’s online web portal www.visitbritain.com .
The prominent portal was designed and implemented by SapientNitro, an agency valued for its omni-channel customer experience, and hosted with Rackspace. First commissioned to work with the UK’s foremost tourism brand in 2010, SapientNitro most recently ensured VisitBritain’s success throughout the London 2012 Olympics period with flawless uptime despite significant spikes in traffic.
Visibility for Visit Britain was maximised during the Olympic Games through campaigns sponsored by the Department for Culture Media and Sport and Number 10, as well as actor Stephen Fry, who was featured in a VisitEngland TV advertisement and promoted the portal through Twitter. As a result of this increased exposure, the site was required to serve between 3,000 to 500,000 people per hour.
“The Rackspace team is thrilled to have worked with VisitBritain throughout London 2012’s defining moments in British history. Exceptional uptime performance was key here, so with a team effort charged up by SapientNitro’s unparalleled track record for redefining the way brands engage today’s connected consumers and our own Fanatical Rackers working 24x7, we saw the site explode with demands of up to 1,200 visitors per second,” said Taylor Rhodes, Managing Director, International at Rackspace. Following the Olympic Games, VisitBritain confirmed that the platform operated at peak performance throughout the Olympics. As with every aspect of the London 2012 programme, the need to optimise legacy and sustainability elements arising from the Games was of paramount importance.
SapientNitro’s close strategic alignment to the benefits of Rackspace’s cloud platform paved the way for maximum future flexibility. With Rackspace’s open approach, VisitBritain’s web investment can now be developed onward with no fear of vendor lock-in, wherever it chooses to buy its cloud services from in the future.
“The 2012 Olympics was the perfect opportunity to connect consumers with a seamless experience. By combining Rackspace’s cutting-edge cloud services, we were able to provide VisitBritain with an experience that exceeded expectations,” said Mohammad Wasim, Global Infrastructure Lead at SapientNitro. “We’re honoured to be part of this strategic partnership with Rackspace and look forward to developing more projects for VisitBritain in the future.”
ENDS
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company and founder of OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace delivers its renowned Fanatical Support® to more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents. Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, which enable businesses to run their workloads where they run most effectively — whether on the public cloud, a private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk.
Forward-Looking Statements
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