Author: Tracy Idell Hamilton
Source: Planet OpenStack
Each week, Rackspace futurist Robert Scoble connects with startups and other innovative companies and shares his insights in his free, weekly email newsletter, Life and Tech. This week’s email is extra long, and comes a day early. Read the excerpt below to see why:
Yesterday Rackspace announced it partnered with Amazon to provide Fanatical SupportⓇ to Amazon Web Services. Here’s a good aggregate of recent press coverage.
With all of those details out there, I can already hear a lot of you asking about what this means for our other cloud offerings, whether they’re from OpenStack or Microsoft Azure. Let’s take each one on one by one.
First, we recently announced a huge deal with Intel regarding OpenStack, so know that our investments continue in OpenStack.
Regarding Microsoft, we’ve been one of their biggest partners for years, and we see Microsoft as a huge player in the cloud ecosystem. If you haven’t noticed, Microsoft has something like a dozen billion-dollar businesses (or larger) and most of those are in the Enterprise.
If you think our partnership with AWS is a “take all our resources and bet it on one horse” kind of race, you are mistaken, and you’re missing what we’re really up to.
So what’s Rackspace up to, Scoble?
Rackspace wants to be the service leader in the cloud market. And the market has evolved into a multi-cloud world. How can we provide the best service if we are only pushing one cloud (whether that’s OpenStack or Azure or AWS)? That’s not Fanatical Support.
What is?
Taking the customer’s side. Customers don’t want to be pushed to one cloud or another. I don’t want to be treated like that either. I want someone to sit down and authoritatively explain to me what the advantages are of putting my business on one cloud or another.
For some, that will be AWS. For others, it might be OpenStack, and for others still, it might be Microsoft Azure. There are a lot of businesses that might need to be on two of these clouds at the same time too.
Which is why I explained in my Facebook post this morning that Rackspace is now the Switzerland of clouds.
So this is big news for us at Rackspace, as we truly embrace this new multi-cloud world.
You can read the press release for the particulars about what Rackspace and Amazon are doing together, but in short, we made a deal to provide Fanatical Support for AWS, plus introduced three additional beta offerings, Managed Security for AWS, Compliance Assistance for AWS and Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager (which runs on AWS).
I’m here to explain the why.
For that, you have to go way back to 2010 when I first saw Flipboard. I saw it months before it was released and knew it would be a really amazing company. I turned to Founder/CEO Mike McCue and asked him, “What cloud are you using?” (Even by then in Silicon Valley, nearly every startup had decided to use cloud, rather than hosting their own infrastructure in a cage somewhere).
He gave an answer I had already heard many times before and since: AWS.
Since then though, the cloud space has gotten a lot more competitive.
Microsoft Azure and Google’s App Engine both came from companies with deep pockets. They are pouring billions into their cloud offerings. At Rackspace, we gifted OpenStack to the open source world and it’s taken off, with companies from Comcast to Nike using it to run their businesses.
The world of cloud has gotten flatter and more complex; even if you just stay on AWS you’ll see that it has hundreds of APIs, many of which have been added in just the past few years.
Because of that, the press has tried to portray the current landscape as a full-blown war over cloud. Innovative businesses from Uber to Instagram have bet on it and bet big. Plus, most enterprises are now hosting on cloud, or at a minimum, cloud technology hosted in their own datacenters.
Yeah, it’s easy for the highly technical folks that start new companies. But let’s be honest. If you know how to build and scale a new service like Uber, and those skills could be used at a pre-IPO startup, why would you want to work for, say, a pizza chain?
But isn’t your local mom and pop pizza chain being asked to build the same kind of apps and systems that Uber has built?
Not to mention, a lot of businesses don’t know how to deal with being on say, the television show Shark Tank, or, for the bigger businesses, keeping their online or ecommerce platforms up and running during a huge peak in traffic because of a Super Bowl commercial. Getting on Shark Tank can bring a 5,000 percent increase in traffic, and if you haven’t built your system properly, it can be tough slugging through the busiest and most important day of your company’s life.
Heck, I was hanging out with the guy who runs Coachella’s music festival (200,000 attendees), Gopi Sangha. After I interviewed him, he told me he couldn’t get through to his cloud provider on the festival’s busiest day of the year — they weren’t answering their phones and it forced him to deal with a slow ticketing system.
The day when all of his customers were registering their armbands and loading its app up with the latest schedule, his business was down.
When you say Fanatical Support, most people don’t recognize what that means, unless they’ve experienced it, or they’ve experienced the lack thereof, like the chief geek at Coachella.
Check out the entire email — all 1,800 fascinating words! — by signing up for his free weekly newsletter.
After you do, you may want to connect with Scoble. Well, he reads all his email — scoble@rackspace.com — and says responses to the newsletter go to the top of his inbox. He’s pretty prolific on Facebook, too.
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