Rackspace has confirmed it has completed the acquisition of TriCore Solutions, a managed application and infrastructure provider.
The move was first announced in May, at a similar time to the San Antonio-based managed cloud provider announcing Joe Eazor, formerly of EarthLink, as the company’s new CEO. Mark Clayman, CEO of TriCore, will head up the newly created enterprise applications division at Rackspace, reporting directly to president Jeff Cotten.
“We acquired TriCore in response to customer demand,” said Matt Bradley, Rackspace vice president of strategy and corporate development. “Customers want a managed application expert to deliver a high quality service experience at a lower total cost for these complex applications and TriCore has been doing this for nearly two decades – they’ve done an incredible job and now our customers will be able to benefit from their experiences.”
Rackspace was recently named as a niche player in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service, alongside companies including Virtustream, CenturyLink, and Fujitsu. Yet as David Linthicum pointed out in an InfoWorld article, Rackspace’s position as a managed services ‘enabler’, for clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, sets them apart from the competition in that particular square, which he describes as ‘niche IaaS providers to enterprises.’
In its analysis, Gartner praised Rackspace’s ‘evolution’ from OpenStack-based public cloud IaaS to its roots in managed services, making it “well-positioned to deliver hybrid and multi-cloud solutions”, but noting public cloud IaaS customers may expect more of its offerings.
The completed acquisition of TriCore, alongside the continued recognition from Gartner, will augur well as Eazor settles down in the CEO role. “Let me emphasise how excited I am by the huge market opportunity that Rackspace has in front of it, as companies move out of their corporate data centres and into multiple clouds,” he wrote in an introductory blog last month. “Rackspace is uniquely well positioned to take advantage of this trend, as the only provider who can deliver expertise and exceptional customer service for all of the leading public and private clouds, along with managed hosting.”
Eazor officially started work at Rackspace on June 12. But whither previous CEO Taylor Rhodes? Rhodes did not have a long period away from the hot seat – he has since become chief executive of SMS Assist, a multisite property management provider.
Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original