Rackspace Overview

• Rackspace is a cloud computing company that offers the necessary infrastructure that allows companies to host websites, apps and email, among others. They help companies determine, design and customize their IT solution.
• They also offer data center service, colocation, application services, and professional services, such as application development and customer reliability engineering.
• They offer a huge database of business applications and a host of solutions for businesses.
• Although based in the US, they have a worldwide reach and offer their services to companies in over 150 countries.
• They help companies determine the IT needs that suits them as well as offer solutions that help modernize the company's IT deployment.
• They also help secure a company's infrastructure and provide compliance services.

Target Customer

• Rackspace targets small, medium and big businesses where IT solutions are required.
• They target customers in dozens of industries, including defense, agriculture, aerospace, government, business services, consumer goods, healthcare, automotive, biotech, education, financial services, among others.

Customer Experience

• Rackspace makes the onboarding process easy by providing experienced engineers, system administrators, and solution architects to help businesses in the onboarding process and beyond.
• They have over 3,000 engineers, 600 experts in enterprise software such as Salesforce, Sap, and Oracle, and over 2,500 experts in applications such as Microsoft Office suite, Amazon Web Service, Redhat, among others. Dedicated experts help clients all through the process, including determining the right solutions, setting up and providing training.
• They have 425 positive customer review on an independent site and many customers are impressed with their service.
• They have a reputation for being fanatical about customer service and customer support.
• They "combine proactive, always-on service and expertise with best-in-class tools and automation to deliver" the right IT solutions.

Pricing

• Rackspace has its detailed pricing list per application publicly available.
• The company prices its services and infrastructure on a per hour bases and assumes a total of 730 hours per month for its monthly pricing.
• The company doesn't provide infrastructure without service and as such the pricing for infrastructure also includes cost for providing 24x7x365 assistance.
• The company charges a minimum of $50 for its managed infrastructure products and a minimum of $500 monthly for its managed operation across all its cloud services.
• The company offers special discounts to companies that commit to spend at least $5,000 on cloud servers.

How the Product Fits into the industry

• Rackspace provides cloud computing services that allows companies to host all their IT infrastructure seamlessly on the cloud.
• They offer the right tools, support, and resources to make the transition to cloud computing easy, and cost-efficient.
• They offer a broad portfolio of applications, security, data, and infrastructure and help companies find the right fit for them.
• Unlike its competition, Rackspace also offers IT consulting services and provide solutions and support for third party applications such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, AWS, among others.
• They don't just offer cloud computing infrastructure and solutions, they help companies determine and design the right IT solutions and cloud computing they need.
• They have a large workforce of experienced and skilled professionals that enable them to offer dedicated 24x7x365 solutions to their customers.

Competitors

•  Rackspace's competitors include Equinix, Nutanix, and Switch.
• The competitors were selected by revenue. Rackspace's revenue is about $2 billion, Equinix has revenue of about $5.1 billion, Nutanix has revenue of $1.2 billion, and Switch has a revenue of $459 million.

Equinix

• Equinix is a multinational company that provides data center services, colocation services, and cloud computing infrastructure.
• They specialize in offering enterprises peak connectivity, interconnection services, and professional services such as disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

Nutanix

• Nutanix is a cloud computing company that helps companies unify public, private, and distributed clouds.
• They also provide data center services, allowing companies to modernize their cloud offerings or on-premise offerings.

Switch

• Switch specializes in providing best-in-class data center infrastructure, solution, and services.
• They also provide colocation services and cloud computing services, enabling "clients to creatively find the right mix of on-premise and off-premise services from infrastructure-as-service (IaaS), to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers."