Rackspace Snaps Up Salesforce Specialist RelationEdge

Rackspace acquired RelationEdge, a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner, expanding Rackspace's business from infrastructure and platforms into cloud applications, also known as software-as-a-service or SaaS, the company said Thursday.

"The acquisition will add implementation and managed services for Software-as-a-Service applications, specifically Salesforce applications, to [Rackspace's] growing IT-as-a-Service portfolio," Rackspace said in an email statement.

RelationEdge provides professional services in technology, business process optimization and marketing, to help companies "engage with their customers from lead to loyalty," according to a statement from Rackspace.

Figure 1:

Want to know more about the cloud? Visit the Light Reading Enterprise Cloud channel.

RelationEdge is based in San Diego, founded in 2013, and has offices in a dozen cities across the US, with 125 employees. "Rackspace intends to operate the business with considerable independence under its current leadership and the RelationEdge brand," Rackspace says.

Rackspace launched managed Kubernetes services this week, part of an ongoing transition from hosting and private cloud to managed multi-cloud. (See Rackspace Launches Kubernetes-as-a-Service.)

Rackspace's current direction combines hosted private cloud in Rackspace's own data centers with managed services for public cloud on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and government public cloud. And the RelationEdge acquisition broadens Rackspace's portfolio further.

Rackspace acquired Datapipe, another managed service provider with strong ties to the federal government, late last year.

There have been several enterprise cloud acquisitions this week. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) snapped up Cask Data, an open source enterprise Hadoop platform provider for big data, though it's not certain that deal was a straightforward acquisition or some other arrangement. (See Google Absorbing Enterprise Big Data Startup.)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired Plexxi for software-defined networking. (See HPE to Acquire Plexxi for Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Muscle.)

And Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) bought DataScience.com to enhance Oracle's machine learning. (See Oracle Boosts Machine Learning With DataScience.com Buy.)

Related posts:

— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading