Rackspace rebrands (again) and repositions for digital transformation

Rackspace is following up on a series of acquisitions and strategic partnerships designed to provide comprehensive solutions across the entire technology transformation lifecycle. It also changed its name for the fourth time in its 22 year history.

The company started out as a provider of server space to web developers before shifting gears to cloud computing. It didn’t fare well going up against Amazon and Microsoft and shifted to managed services in recent years.

The company, now known as Rackspace Technology, said the name change is meant to reflect the end-to-end technology solutions it plans to provide in four areas:

• Cloud optimization to help customers improve costs and performance
• Cloud security by providing security and compliance services for the enterprise and the cloud
• Cloud-native enablement to accelerate multicloud adoption with application, data, and security
• Data modernization to help make predictive, data-driven decisions that accelerate innovation and increase ROI

“Our new name, mission and multicloud solutions better represent the full value we bring to market. Our mission is simple. Embrace technology. Empower customers. Deliver the future,” says Kevin Jones, CEO of Rackspace Technology in a statement.

Rackspace Technology is prioritizing the modernization of legacy IT infrastructure through things like VMware Cloud on AWS, Kubernetes and container-enabled services.

Rackspace acqusitions

Rackspace has made several acquisitions and strategic partnerships in recent years, the most recent being of Onica, an Amazon Web Services consultant and managed services provider. It also bought TriCore, a technology service company; Datapipe, a managed cloud services company; and RelationEdge, a business consultant for Salesforce.com.

Rackspace has also entered into strategic partnerships cloud-security firms Alert Logic and Armor as well as Tech Mahindra, a digital consulting firm based in India.

The new name comes on the heels of an April report from Reuters that it was readying for a new initial public offering with the potential to raise more than $10 billion. Rackspace went public in August 2008 but was acquired by private equity company Apollo Global Management LLC in November 2016 and taken private. Bloomberg News reported in 2018 that Apollo was considering taking the company public but so far that hasn’t happened.