Rackspace partners with Pivotal to launch managed services for Cloud Foundry

Rackspace, which strongly focuses on managed services these days, today announced a partnership with Pivotal, the company behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform as a service project. Rackspace already offers managed services for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware, OpenStack and it is now adding Pivotal Cloud Foundry to this mix.

Rackspace, which made the announcement at its Solve conference in New York today, will help enterprises that run Pivotal Cloud Foundry (and virtually all Cloud Foundry users are enterprises) manage their deployments, no matter whether they are running them in a public or private cloud. This allows enterprises to outsource the management of their cloud and Rackspace guarantees a 99.99 percent uptime and a 15-minute response time for emergency issues.

Given that Cloud Foundry is currently in use by many Fortune 100 companies — and there aren’t all that many alternatives for enterprises that want to run their own platform as a service to develop and run their applications — it doesn’t come as a surprise that Rackspace, too, wants to offer services around it. Indeed, it’s actually surprising that it hasn’t done so already.

The reason for that may be that its previous offerings focused on infrastructure. With this move, Rackspace is getting into the managed platform space and that’s something new for the company.

“Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry is Rackspace’s first step into the managed platform space, as we move up the stack to solutions that customers want our help with,” wrote Brannon Lacey, vice president of applications and platforms at Rackspace, in today’s announcement. “It is a solution that helps customers get up and running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry quickly and stay up and running, with operational support and proactive monitoring. This way, in-house teams can focus on innovation and getting out to market quickly while Rackspace handles the backend.”