Next-Gen Managed Service Providers Utilize Uber Model to Drive Multi-Cloud Success

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Next-Gen Managed Service Providers Utilize Uber Model to Drive Multi-Cloud Success

Since its founding in 2010, Uber has grown rapidly — it now controls 77 percent of the U.S. ride-hailing market and fulfills some 40 million rides every month.

In many consumer-based industries, being “the Uber” has become synonymous with technology-enabled ecosystems that drive new levels of benefits for users.

In the new multi-cloud world, next-generation managed service providers (MSPs) can also leverage Uber-like concepts to help enterprises achieve breakthrough performance and efficiencies in managing their business applications across heterogeneous cloud environments.

In order to enable a many-to-many Uber model, for cars or for clouds, the experience must meet standards for security, compliance and ease-of-use, while addressing the specific needs of each individual business.

According to Rightscale’s 2017 State of the Cloud Report, 85 percent of enterprises currently pursue a multi-cloud strategy, which means they’re using multiple clouds, often from different providers, across public and private platforms.

The survey also points out that on average, companies run applications on four clouds while experimenting with another four. Additionally, legacy workloads still running in corporate data centers create a complicated mix of different IT systems and deployments.

Industry analysts expect the proliferation of cloud platforms to continue, just as they expect the current surge in managed services for these different, often unique IT arrangements to keep up pace. Analysts also point out that cloud adoption strategies are expected to influence more than 50 percent of IT deals through 2020.

Businesses today need to optimize on a workload by workload basis, and that creates a need to support multiple clouds. However, adopting a strategy for running multiple clouds can get complicated quickly. Vendor-specific clouds operate on their own code base, APIs and other configuration requirements. Many companies lack the internal expertise and resources needed to build and operate cloud environments on multiple platforms in a secure and cost-effective manner.

Given the demands of leveraging a multi-cloud environment, businesses benefit by getting help from a managed service provider with a breadth of certified expertise across cloud platforms, strong customer references and a solid track record over many years.

That’s why, this past June, I chose to come to Rackspace, a managed service provider uniquely positioned to be the multi-cloud expert that can best partner with businesses to win by utilizing the optimal cloud solution based on a workload-by-workload analysis.

Rackspace serves customers in more than 150 countries and offers expertise and Fanatical Support for all the leading public (e.g., AmazonMicrosoft, Google) and private cloud platforms (e.g., VMwareMicrosoftOpenStack).

Additionally, Rackspace offers fully-managed, single-tenant dedicated hosting as well as managed security services, email hosting, managed databases, eCommerce solutions and website hosting.

Rackspace’s recent acquisition of Datapipe strengthens the company’s position even further as the leading provider of multi-cloud managed services and expands its capabilities into the public sector, new geographic regions, managed services for the Alibaba Cloud (the largest in China) and deepens its already extensive experience with large enterprises.

The Datapipe announcement also comes on the heels of Rackspace’s recent launch of a new managed service for Pivotal Cloud Foundry and the acquisition in May of TriCore Solutions, which enables Rackspace to deliver expertise for enterprise applications, including Oracle and SAP.

The many-to-many model exemplified by Uber provides a path to success for MSPs such as Rackspace in what will be a multi-cloud world for years to come. Many businesses will benefit by coming along for the ride.