Rackspace climbs the cloud stack

With the acquisition of RelationEdge, Rackspace expands into providing professional services to enterprises looking to transform their businesses processes using the cloud.

And while RelationEdge specializes in Salesforce.com Inc. , its expertise goes far beyond that particular application platform. Rackspace is looking to leverage RelationEdge to help enterprises make the most of all the major cloud applications, including Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Oracle and more, Matt Bradley, Rackspace chief strategy officer, tells Light Reading.

Rackspace started as a managed hosting company, focused entirely on infrastructure services, and then expanded to provide its own private and public cloud platform, and then third-party cloud management on platforms including Amazon Web Services Inc. , Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud . Last year's Datapipe acquisition bolstered Rackspace's multicloud strategy. (See Rackspace Acquiring Datapipe in Multi-Cloud Managed Services Play.)

Recently, Rackspace started moving earlier in the enterprise transition to cloud, building out professional services to help enterprise customers choose the right cloud, implement the right architecture, and provide ongoing application support, Bradley says.

Following that, Rackspace moved up the stack to manage applications for enterprises, acquiring TriCore Solutions a year ago. Rackspace hired Gerard Brossard to oversee its application services business. (See Rackspace Acquires TriCore, Eyes Enterprise Apps Management.)

Figure 1: Rackspace, 2013. Photo by Garrett Heath, (CC BY 2.0)

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At about that time, Rackspace brought in Joe Eazor as its new CEO. (See Rackspace Taps EarthLink Executive Joe Eazor as New CEO.)

Rackspace bought RelationEdge last week. The 125-person San Diego-based consultancy provides professional services in technology, business process optimization and marketing, to help companies "engage with their customers from lead to loyalty," using Salesforce, according to a statement from Rackspace. (See Rackspace Snaps Up Salesforce Specialist RelationEdge .)

The RelationEdge acquisition moves Rackspace into business process transformation, Bradley says.

"Technology is all about business process," Bradley says. "That's one thing we like about RelationEdge -- RelationEdge is about business process first and technology second."

And it goes beyond Salesforce, which is RelationEdge's current specialty. "They have a process for working with customers to figure out their needs." That process can form a foundation for a much broader SaaS management offering -- ServiceNow, Workday, SAP Cloud, Oracle Cloud and other cloud application platforms, Bradley says.

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— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading