IDC MarketScape names Rackspace as a major player in colocation

Organizations evaluating colocation and cloud technologies have another major player to consider when choosing a service provider. Just 18 months after formally launching Rackspace Colocation Services, the IDC MarketScape has named Rackspace as a “Major Player” in the ‘IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Colocation and Interconnection Services 2019–2020 Vendor Assessment’.

This IDC MarketScape report noted, “Because of comprehensive Rackspace Hosting, Managed Hybrid Cloud ecosystem, it offers a wide range of initial "lift and shift" and a road map for private cloud, public cloud, and interconnection services that can be scaled as companies grow and become more adept at leveraging the cloud. Colocation is offered as piece of the puzzle.”

Rackspace offers global colocation options that complement our broad portfolio of managed services for private and public clouds, security, applications and data. And this is offered alongside our global interconnect service, RackConnect Global, which connects data centers with cloud providers and allows our customers to run workloads where it makes the most sense.

According to Courtney Munroe, GVP, Telecommunications Research at IDC, “The migration to digital platforms, as well as the requirement for seamless and efficient interconnection to network providers, and cloud platforms is strong driver for the colocation and interconnection market for enterprises, content, and service providers.”

Rackspapce addresses these requirements through a robust global backbone that ties together all our data centers and edge locations, which are interconnected with multiple hyper-scale public cloud providers, Megaport, and the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric in locations across the globe. From one physical connection, we can spin up a multitude of virtual connections to endpoints across all of those ecosystems to facilitate our colocation customers’ multicloud strategies.

We believe that some additional reasons for our colocation success include:

• Smart Hands SLA: The top colocation providers, most of which are Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), operate in a very lean fashion. At any given time, they may have only a handful of employees on-site. As a high-touch cloud services provider, we have dozens of employees at our data centers 24x7x365, so that we can offer stringent guarantees on our Smart Hands for Colocation service. We’re the only colocation provider that offers a Smart Hands SLA.
   
• Hyperscale Data Center Integration: Rackspace has amassed vast purchasing power from procuring data center capacity for nearly two decades. We’ve been wielding our well-honed relationships and preferred rates to deliver wholesale colocation across multiple providers to hyperscale users through a single MSA.
   
• Services on top of your gear: Typically, to secure managed services for your IT hardware, you must forgo owning the underlying gear. And while Rackspace offers a full suite of VMware, Openstack and Microsoft private cloud options that include the hardware, we also understand many companies have hardware investments that are still of value. For that reason, Rackspace can manage cloud environments running on customer-owned hardware. We allow you to offload management, while you enjoy depreciating your capital investment, effectively lowering your capital expenditures and operating expenses.

By choosing Rackspace Colocation, you get access to services from a “Major Player” in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Colocation and Interconnection Services 2019-2020 Vendor Assessment (doc# US45717419, December 2019) while positioning your organization one step closer to the hybrid and multi-cloud solutions offered by a single managed services provider.

For more insight on how colocation can add value to your business, download our Rethinking Colocation in 2020 whitepaper.