Rackspace has announced it is to acquire managed service provider Datapipe in what is being touted as the ‘biggest acquisition by far’ in the company’s history.

The company added it would make Rackspace the world’s leading provider of multi-cloud managed services, managed public cloud services across all the hyperscale infrastructure vendors, and – by a larger margin – the managed hosting and private cloud market.

“As we’ve learned more about one another, leaders of Rackspace and Datapipe have been struck by how similar our two companies are,” wrote Joe Eazor, Rackspace CEO in a company blog post announcing the news. “Rackspace intends to build on the industry leadership the two companies have established in reliability and support to create a new level of end to end customer experience.”

The acquisition once completed – sometime in the fourth quarter, Rackspace added – will overtake the previous buyout of TriCore Solutions, announced back in May, in size. “When Rackspace went private late last year, we did so mainly because, at this point in our history, we need to make major, long-term investments in the capabilities our customers are demanding,” added Eazor. “And that’s just what we’re doing.”

Since Eazor took over, around the same time as the TriCore acquisition was announced, the company’s focus on managed cloud services has been clear. Writing his debut blog as CEO, Eazor noted: “Thanks to the strategy Rackspace adopted a few years ago, it’s got the early lead in the managed cloud space. My goal here is to build on that foundation and make us the world’s preeminent IT services company.”

The acquisition of Datapipe therefore plays very nicely into this trend. The company has been featured in this publication on various occasions, not least when the British Medical Journal (BMJ) used Datapipe to transform its infrastructure. As CloudTech noted when telling this story in September last year, the BMJ’s environment was not the easiest to work with; one release per month changed to up to four releases per day, with content and services built and delivered around APIs as opposed to weekly batch file transfers.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original