Pivotal and Rackspace partner to launch managed services for Cloud Foundry

Rackspace, a hybrid cloud services provider, has announced a partnership with Pivotal, the company behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform as a service project. At its Solve conference is New York, Rackspace announced that it is partnering with Pivotal to launch managed services for Cloud Foundry.

Rackspace is not new to the managed services business, but recent events suggest a radical shift in its focus. The San Antonio based company has increasingly focused on managed services these days. It started offering managed services to AWS and now does it for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware and OpenStack. Now Cloud Foundry is latest on the list.

“Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry is Rackspace’s first step into the managed platform space, as we move up the stack to solutions that customers want our help with,” said Brannon Lacey, vice president of applications and platforms at Rackspace. “It is a solution that helps customers get up and running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry quickly and stay up and running, with operational support and proactive monitoring. This way, in-house teams can focus on innovation and getting out to market quickly while Rackspace handles the backend.”

According to the announcement at Solve, Rackspace will help enterprises running cloud Foundry manage their deployments, no matter whether they are running them in a public or private cloud. This essentially lets enterprises outsource their cloud management and Rackspace guarantees a 99.99 percent uptime and a 15-minute response time for emergency issues.

Cloud Foundry is already being used by a lot of the Fortune 100 companies, since there aren’t many alternatives or enterprises that want to run their own platform as a service to develop and run their applications. So it totally makes sense for Rackspace–which strongly focuses on managed services these days– to build services around it.