Picture credit: Flickr/Andrew Hyde

Rackspace has announced it has expanded its service offering with Microsoft, working with customers to speed up their deployment of Azure cloud services.

The two companies are unveiling a self-service hybrid solution utilising Rackspace’s private cloud powered by Microsoft Cloud Platform. The two companies, who have enjoyed a 13 year partnership, will aim to minimise costs and optimise performance with its feted fanatical support, offering a 100% network uptime guarantee and one hour hardware replacement.

This move is targeted squarely at organisations who are not quite ready to go all out with the public cloud, serving customers who want public, private and hybrid cloud environments built on the Microsoft Azure stack. Alongside the support, Rackspace will offer architectural guidance to customers, helping them build applications – in some cases to take into account on premise IT environments – and optimise databases.

Taylor Rhodes, Rackspace CEO, said following the announcement: “Our strategy at Rackspace has always been to provide the world’s best expertise and service for industry-leading technologies. We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Microsoft and the options we provide for our customers by offering Fanatical Support for Azure.”

Rackspace recently won the 2015 Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year award. Following an uneasy last 12 months, in which the company abandoned takeover plans in September, shares in the company plummeted. Following the Microsoft deal, investors are being much more kind. Zacks upgraded the firm’s shares from a hold rating to a strong buy rating, while Wells Fargo & Co reaffirmed its outperform rating.

Elsewhere, the open cloud provider is shovelling a “significant investment” into CrowdStrike’s $100 million series C financing round. The company, whose total funding round pot stands at $156m, includes Rackspace as a customer and provides software as a service around an endpoint protection platform.