Rackspace is one of the biggest cloud hosting providers in the world. It’s certainly one of the oldest and most well-known ones as well. The company has decided to expand beyond its offices in Asia, Europe, and Australia to the Middle East and Africa.
Simon Crawley-Trice, VP Global Solutions and Services, said that the decision to expand was an “easy” move. Crawley-Trice is responsible for the strategic direction of the company and decisions regarding new markets. Since it manages over 500 customers in the region, it’s only natural that Rackspace expands to Middle East countries. This move will allow them to better engage with their customers on the ground.
With the increasing population of the region and increased business opportunities due to foreign investment, Rackspace’s expansion was inevitable. Its customers are usually large companies that have a huge demand for cloud-based storage and operations services. That being said, they’re obviously not the only competitor in this space. Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., all have their own cloud-hosting services. According to Crawley-Trice, however, what differentiates them is their “unbiased approach”.
He says that Rackspace doesn’t limit a customer’s options of migrating to the cloud. They don’t restrict them to a single vendor since they’re cloud specialists. Hence, they concentrate on driving value to their customers. In fact, they work closely with some of their direct competitors, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Also, since the Middle East is a vastly untapped market in terms of cloud hosting, there’s a lot to expand. According to Gartner, the Middle East will not have reached the cloud usage of the US in 2017 until at least 2022. Hence, Rackspace is interested in being one of the leaders in the proliferation of cloud hosting in the Middle East. Crawley-Trice believes that the lack of skillset in the region is the main reason for the lack of functionality. Hence, Rackspace believes in supplying the region with the necessary engineers and architects to shift that balance.
Rackspace is coming to the region with a workforce of over 3000 architects and engineers. That is nearly half the total number of employees that Rackspace currently has. That number of people will be able to move a lot of workflows forward. The Middle East can look forward to high-quality services due to Rackspace’s global expertise.
This is all part of a larger plan to expand to the African region and Europe as well. The entire plan is called EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa). The expansion has a billion-dollar investment behind it and includes the launch of a Dubai-based hub.
This is expected to bring in billions of dollars in revenue to the company and open up many potential partnerships.
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