Rackspace committed to customer success in the cloud

Source: Rackspace. Bhargava.

Rackspace is all about accelerating the value of cloud, with the Asian segment of the business making more of an impact since Sandeep Bhargava, MD, Asia Pacific Japan (APJ), Rackspace, came on board in September 2019.

The company has a very focused business model, Bhargava said, and is committed to delivering value. "Our whole expertise is around assessing and migrating cloud and optimising it, nothing else," stated Bhargava.

The managed cloud service provider, which has professional and managed services across apps, data, security, hybrid and multiple clouds, says it accelerates transformation initiatives, overcomes challenges and delivers business goals for customers. It has consolidated customer initiatives into six categories:

- Define my cloud and digital strategies to drive growth

- Accelerate my digital transformation and business value

- Power my IT needs

- Modernise my data, applications, cloud and organisation

- Secure my digital presence, from apps to multicloud

- Optimise my spend

Rackspace's successes at addressing these initiatives can be seen in the case studies it shared at a recent media event:

Challenger

Challenger, a consumer electronics retailer in Singapore, was moving into e-commerce in 2017 and 2018, and has since evolved from implementing e-commerce automation to analytics and bringing more value from data.

Challenger was faced with evolving market expectations and needed to transform its retail business into a true online-to-offline (O2O) model that provided a more integrated shopping experience.

Rackspace provided compliance, e-commerce hosting, managed cloud, managed public cloud on AWS, professional services, application services/DevOps, and security services, ensuring that Challenger could easily automate and scale infrastructure.

The retailer cut lead times from up to eight weeks to just one to two days, in addition to enjoying increased security and compliance as well as more IT resources to help the business innovate and increase revenue.

"We brought cloud to reality for them, which is something that they couldn't do on their own, without Rackspace," commented Matthew Heap, Head of Solution Architecture, Asia, Rackspace.

Equus

The case of Equus, a real estate investment business reinforces the Rackspace position as a specialised provider of end-to-end solutions, said Gene Tang, Head of Professional Services, Asia, Rackspace. Equus had built a disaster recovery platform but needed a more effective solution. Rackspace brought their disaster recovery up to scratch technically.

"We came in, completely understood their business challenge, and rearchitected their disaster recovery platform end-to-end," Tang said. "We also restructured processes to be able to execute disaster recovery when their business needed it."

Rackspace helped Equus plan, design and build out an Azure site recovery solution for disaster recovery, providing DevOps, security, and disaster recovery services on Azure. The project took four months, and was delivered on time, under budget. Current disaster recovery metrics exceed recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) metrics by 80%. RPO refers to where in the past a company will recover data to, whereas RTO refers to the time when the company will be operational again.

"It really reinforces the message that Sandeep mentioned about us being specialists, being really good within cloud platforms and helping businesses that are just starting to get into that," Tang said.

Noble Group

The Noble Group has been a Rackspace customer for close to 10 years. The two companies have worked together through many mergers and acquisitions, and in this case Noble Group required help with a divestiture. The company also had a big requirement to reduce IT costs dramatically in 2019. 

Rackspace helped Noble Group improve agility while reducing costs, providing professional services for IT and business transformation, migration, performance, scalability on Azure. Noble Group saw its server count reduced from 2,000 to 200, for instance.

"That's something that we've achieved with with moving to Microsoft, and it really not only reduced the cost, but it also reduced their overheads, so they were able to really focus on that core business which had a lot of pressure in the market," Heap said.

Tokio Marine Life Insurance Singapore

Tokio Marine Life Insurance, registered in Singapore, offers an extensive selection of general and life insurance products and is part of Tokio Marine Holdings. To improve customer experience, the Tokio Marine office in Singapore needed a partner with Azure expertise to ensure strict compliance with regulations for their new life insurance customer portal.

Rackspace helped Tokio Marine develop the infrastructure and environment supporting its new portal through its Managed Public Cloud service, as well as professional services for security. The portal was built on best-practice infrastructure design, and incorporated the latest resiliency and security features.

Rackspace has been voted a Great Place To Work in 2019, an achievement reflected in the rise in Asia Pacific headcount. There are now about 950 employees in the Asia Pacific region, out of a total of some 6,300 globally, and leaders with a focus spanning Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.

"The kind of business we are, our leadership has to be distributed across all three (territories)," said Bhargava. "What we've done in this region is, we make sure that each of our leadership is out in the market...If you want to keep customers happy and growing, it's a team effort. Every single leader has to be (involved)."

He also shared that pioneering work conducted in Asia around Rackspace Service Blocks had been exported to US, when it is traditionally the other way around. A Rackspace Service Block is a flexible service offering that helps customers build their own cloud services.

Bhargava's strategy is working. He shared that the Asia Pacific region saw growth in the last two financial quarters. "Our target is to grow double-digit from this year," he said. "Sales are already in the high double digits.