“If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world,” says Prashanth Chandasekar, Senior Vice President & General Manager at Rackspace. “But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.”

Prashanth Chandasekar, SVP & GM at Rackspace, discusses how Rackspace has transformed from primarily a hosting company to a technology service company helping enterprises effectively and efficiently move to the cloud on AWS and other platforms in an interview on theCUBE at AWS Summit London 2019:

Rackspace Helping Companies Navigate to the AWS Cloud

Ultimately part of the reason why customers in our install base were reaching out to us and saying, ”Hey Rackspace, you’ve done a phenomenal job helping us in the first evolution of our journey, can you help us now in this new world where it’s actually quite complicated?” Over 1,400 features on average are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. Despite what we hear in the headlines where cloud first companies and the startups of today are absolutely leveraging Lambda out of the gate or containers out of the gate.

There are a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption trying to compete with these startups. They need a lot of help to reskill their workforce to change the way they think about processes within their organizations between their business development and technology and operations teams. Then ultimately, how do they actually build out a much more agile way of responding to customers? That work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that really large set of features.

There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World

That’s what’s so dynamic about the space. Nobody would have predicted this ten years ago. Even today we’re seeing a ton of momentum with concepts that were very nascent just a few years ago. Kubernetes is a concept where almost every one of our AWS customers at Rackspace, what we call fanatical AWS, are absolutely looking for help on Kubernetes. When we think about Docker a few years ago and Dock Enterprise and we think about Kubernetes and there was that battle, today the battle has been won. Kubernetes is pretty much the de-facto orchestration engine. Nobody would have predicted that a couple of years ago.

Hybrid and multi-cloud are becoming a lot more prevalent. I think even Amazon is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is in hybrid cloud. If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world or a destination is the cloud. But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Outposts is a great acknowledgment of that. Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.