It's Official: Rackspace is Private!

taylorrhodes

It's Official: Rackspace is Private!

A few moments ago, Rackspace filed the final bits of paperwork and closed our transaction to become a private company, under the ownership of investors led by funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management.

This is a big day for Rackspace customers and employees, as well as for our new owners. As I explained back in August, we expect this transaction will help us build a stronger company to better serve our customers. It will give us more flexibility to reallocate our resources and enhance the multi-cloud managed services that today's business customers demand.

We now face an opportunity afforded to very few companies: to rekindle the entrepreneurial spirit of our early years as a startup — but this time as one that employs thousands of specialized engineers with the scale and depth of expertise to serve the world's most complex enterprise customers.

Our transaction with Apollo was approved by a vote of our stockholders on Nov. 2. Funds managed by Apollo have acquired such companies as ADT Corp., the Fresh Market grocery chain, McGraw Hill Education (formerly a textbook publisher and now a leading online education company) and Sirius Satellite Radio (now Sirius XM.) In those cases and others, the acquired companies were given the flexibility to invest their resources in long-term strategies that led them to new heights of success.

Apollo strongly supports our strategy to grow Rackspace and expand the early leadership we've achieved in the fast-growing managed cloud industry. It embraces our unique workplace culture and our emphasis on providing customers with expertise and Fanatical Support for the world's leading clouds, including various private clouds, dedicated servers, and public clouds powered by AWS, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack. Apollo is supportive of our management team continuing to lead the company.

Our headquarters proudly remain in San Antonio, the city where we were founded nearly 18 years ago and that has helped nurture our growth from a tiny startup to a $2 billion-a-year global company. We will continue to be actively engaged in volunteer work and support for the community here and in the dozen other cities where we do business across the U.S. and around the world.

Rackspace customers will see no change in the deep expertise, easy-to-use tools, and exceptional customer service that they expect from us. And over time, with Apollo's support, we intend to offer innovative new products and services to address our customers’ evolving needs.

Apollo understands that we face a big opportunity today as mainstream companies move their computing out of corporate data centers and into multi-cloud models. It knows that our customers who are moving to the cloud want and value our expertise, technology and service. Apollo believes, like we do, that more potential customers would choose Rackspace if they knew of our brand and our capabilities. With this in mind, Apollo will help us tell our story more boldly, as we are doing with the brand awareness campaign we launched last month. Together we will help the world understand a simple and valuable message:

Rackspace. Your clouds. Our expertise.

I couldn't be more excited about Rackspace's future as a private company owned by funds affiliated with Apollo. I want to close by thanking our more than 6,000 Rackers worldwide for keeping their eyes on the ball and delivering Fanatical Support to our customers and to one another during the past few months of this transition.

I also want to thank our customers for keeping faith with us during this period. We will continue to work every day to earn the trust you've placed in us, and we believe that as a private company we'll be able to do even more to help you grow your business for many years to come. Long live Fanatical Support!