Rackspace Partners With Pivotal, Expands With Google
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Cloud manager Rackspace is working with cloud services provider Pivotal Software and Google's public cloud unit to deliver new multi-cloud and other capabilities. The partnerships include management of Pivotal's growing Cloud Foundry platform.
Rackspace said this week it would support Pivotal's cloud-native application development platform designed to run on public or private clouds as well as dedicated hardware owned by either Rackspace or individual enterprise customers. The partnership reflects the growing trend toward multi-cloud and cloud-native deployments as companies fine-tune their IT infrastructure to focus on application deployment.
Rackspace will help manage multi-cloud deployments hosted by Pivotal's Cloud Foundry platform running on customer-owned infrastructure along with leading public and private cloud platforms. The partnership also includes Rackspace OpenStack private and public clouds. (Rackspace and NASA jointly launched the open source cloud software initiative in 2010.)
The partners said the new managed service is intended to quickly deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry so "in-house teams can focus on innovation and getting out to market quickly while Rackspace handles the backend." The partners are betting the managed service will appeal to enterprise customers seeking to focus their DevOps teams on application and service development while Rackspace manages the Pivotal cloud in the background.
Brannon Lacey, vice president of applications and platforms at Rackspace, said the deal illustrates how the cloud provider is seeking to "move up the [software] stack" to manage cloud platforms.
San Francisco-based Pivotal was spun off from VMware (NYSE: VMW) in 2013 to help implement the Cloud Foundry framework. Along with VMware, Pivotal investors include General Electric (NYSE: GE) and storage specialist Dell EMC.
The platform services vendor announced a $653 million funding haul last year led by Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) that was joined by new investor Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT). According to the web site Crunchbase.com, Pivotal has so far raised $1.7 billion in three funding rounds.
The managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available now in all Rackspace regions, the partners said.
Separately, Rackspace announced the beta release of a managed Google Cloud Platform and related engineering support scheduled for September 2017. The partners previously announced a partnership that makes Rackspace the first manager of Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) cloud services. It also manages services for Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure.
"Our decision to begin supporting [Google Cloud Platform] came as a direct response to demand from our customers, who are increasingly asking us to support their workloads on the cloud platform[s] of their choice," Patrick Lee, vice president of Rackspace's Google Cloud business, noted in a blog post announcing the beta launch.
"As we see more and more businesses using hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions, we believe this interest will continue to grow," Lee added.
