Organizations want extraordinary results from their IT units. Today's mantra is faster delivery, better quality, cheaper solutions, and safer environments. Many CIOs are implementing cloud computing enterprise architectures to address these challenges with results varying greatly. Why are some organizations seeing only limited results from cloud computing implementations while others are increasing market share, decreasing costs, generating value, and innovating faster? | By Business Wire | Article Rating: |
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| January 17, 2013 02:41 PM EST | Reads: |
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Rackspace® Hosting, (NYSE:RAX), the open cloud company, today announced it has climbed to 34th on FORTUNE magazine’s annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” FORTUNE has named Rackspace as one of America’s top workplaces in five of the last six years. The full list and related stories will appear in the February 4 issue of FORTUNE, and today at fortune.com/bestcompanies.
“We are honored to once again be included among the great companies on the FORTUNE list, and know that our Fanatical Support and employee engagement got us here,” said Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. “Our employees — we call them Rackers — make our company great. I want to thank them for their work to preserve and improve our unique company culture, even as we grow.”
Rackspace has invested heavily in the company’s unique culture, in training and in creating fun and dynamic work environments for Rackers. Rackspace’s enhanced pay and leave practices were featured by Fortune editors who noted Rackspace’s policy of offering stock options to all employees upon being hired. In 2012, Rackspace also implemented a favorable Employee Stock Purchase Program and increased the number of paid days off, including three paid days for volunteer work outside of the office.
Underpinning Rackspace’s culture is a complex business process that the company has refined over the past decade. That process involves everything from the way Rackspace recruits and extensively interviews prospective Rackers, to the way it tests for and develops a Racker’s specific strengths, to the way it empowers Rackers to spend time and money on customer issues, to the way it measures employee and customer engagement down to the support-team level, to the way it celebrates and rewards success.
The 2012 introduction of Rackspace’s open cloud marked the first time any company deployed a large-scale open source public cloud powered by OpenStack. Rackspace customers can now select from private or public cloud, dedicated, virtualized or hybrid offerings and have the flexibility to deploy their private cloud in their own datacenter, a Rackspace data center or another data center of their choice.
The open cloud platform joined over 75 products and services launches that San Antonio-based Rackspace released in 2012, reflecting a commitment to invest in innovation.
Rackspace intends to maintain its positive momentum heading into 2013 by continuing to expand the scope of its OpenStack-based solutions portfolio. In the near future, Rackspace plans to continue to enhance its portfolio with solutions for high growth opportunities, including Big Data, high scale applications, software defined network enhancements and enterprise needs, among others.
Rackspace continued to expand its global workforce in 2012. Using first-quarter figures — the latest that had been made public when the FORTUNE survey was taken — Rackspace had expanded employment by 24.1 percent from the same quarter in 2011, to more than 4,335 employees. Rackspace currently has more than 230 positions open in San Antonio, Austin, San Francisco, Blacksburg and a half-dozen other U.S. cities, as well as in Europe, Australia, and Asia. Those openings, in departments ranging from software development to tech support and sales, can be seen at http://www.rackertalent.com/.
FORTUNE Survey Methodology
To pick the 100 Best Companies to Work For, FORTUNE partners with the Great Place to Work Institute to conduct the most extensive employee survey in corporate America. Two-thirds of a company's score is based on the results of the institute's Trust Index survey, which is sent to a random sample of employees from each company. The survey asks questions related to their attitudes about management's credibility, job satisfaction, and camaraderie. The other third of the scoring is based on the company's responses to the institute's Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about pay and benefit programs and a series of open-ended questions about hiring practices, internal communications, training, recognition programs and diversity efforts.
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX) is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 197,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support® across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For and is included on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting.” Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements about historical results or third party data that may suggest trends for our business or industry; any statements of the plans, strategies, and objectives of Rackspace for future operations or growth; any statements of expectation or belief regarding future events, and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the items mentioned. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected growth or success may not materialize because of Rackspace's failure to sustain a culture that inspires employees to provide Fanatical Support, failure to execute on its operational plans, rapid technological changes that adversely affect the demand for Rackspace products and services, shifts in customer demand, customers' and potential customers' acceptance of Rackspace products and services, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2012, filed with the SEC on November 7, 2012. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
1 Survey methodology information provided by FORTUNE at www.Fortune.com/bestcompanies.
Published January 17, 2013 Reads 908
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"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dave Eichorn, Global Data Center Practice Head at Zensar, will share a case study describing how a utility services company handled the migration of its Microsoft platform to the cloud. Challenged with the time-consuming task of opening operations out of temporary offices, this company struggled with the need to simultaneously access data that was accumulated from a vast amount of data-intensive jobs. Zensar migrated the company’s application ...
The new open source cloud orchestration platform called OpenStack is the promise of flexible network virtualization, and network overlays are looking closer than ever. The vision of this platform is to enable the on-demand creation of many distinct networks on top of one underlying physical infrastructure in the cloud environment. The platform will support automated provisioning and management of large groups of virtual machines or compute resources, including extensive monitoring in the cloud.
With Cloud Expo New York | 12th Cloud Expo [June 10-13, 2013] hurtling towards us, let's take a look at the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference coming up June 10-13 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.
We have technical and strategy sessions for you all four days dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, wha...
In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013], Intel's Chris Black will review the background of Apache Hadoop, its application, and methods to accelerate data system clusters with Intel SSD technology. The session will overview the genius of Hadoop and provide an overview of the ecosystem landscape.
Cloud Expo/Big Data Expo delegates will learn how the Hadoop framework and SSD technology augment cloud data systems ranging from analytics to on-line transaction pro...
Many have heard of OAuth but are unsure of how it might apply to their business.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, will describe how OAuth can be used to facilitate certain business models and simplify the sharing of private data.
Alistair Farquharson is a visionary industry veteran focused on using disruptive technologies to drive business growth and improve efficiency and agility within organizations. As the CTO of SOA Software A...
One of the most compelling promises of the cloud is that you can pull out a credit card and be working in minutes. No purchase orders to fill out, no equipment to wait for on the loading dock. Just instant access to the resources you need, when you need them. But accessibility comes at a price, and an unintentional consequence may be that you create yet another orphaned identity silo. Enterprise IT has spent years consolidating its mishmash of directories, only to discover that cloud now threate...
Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM's new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises.
Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprint...
The rise of cloud computing has exposed hard drive-based storage as the new data center bottleneck. Combating this, data center managers have deployed SSDs to gain the performance needed to provide real-time access to data. However, due to budget constraints, many have turned to consumer-grade SSDs without understanding that they wear out quickly when processing enterprise workloads. In this session, Esther Spanjer will discuss recent endurance advancements in SSD technology that enable usage of...
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