Why I joined Rackspace Part II – the Products and the Strategy
As someone who has taken an enterprise to the Cloud globally, I understand just how much of an impact the Cloud can have on a business. I have been vocal in pushing the fact that Cloud can open all sorts of possibilities and is not just about cost mitigation and scalability.
Businesses looking to learn more about what Cloud Computing can bring are faced with a plethora of suppliers purporting to have Cloud. Many of the potentially transformational benefits can be lost in the confusion of conflicting ideas, and a sense that it all just sounds like stuff they have heard before.
Real Cloud is hard to fake. The key thing is that the products, services, technologies offered by a vendor enable an enterprise to focus on the business imperatives driving them without having to worry whether the infrastructure will be there when they need it. It is always a tough question: does a company invest in expensive infrastructure just in case it is successful beyond expectations? Does it allow a huge opportunity to slip through its fingers simply because of a conservative approach to investing in infrastructure? Both are risks that all businesses have to traditionally face.
At least, that is how it is without using Cloud. Cloud approaches mean that businesses can effectively forge ahead knowing that the infrastructure will cater for whatever is required. Imagine starting a fishing business and not having to worry about how big a boat and net you should buy, relying on being able to start with modest equipment and elastically expand the ship and net at sea if you happen to come across a huge school of fish.
The freedom from encumbrance that results has the potential to change the approach businesses have to strategic planning, their approach to innovation and the related areas of risk management and process streamlining. More agile methodologies ensue that facilitate experimentation and allow changes to happen more naturally, leading inevitably to a focus on the business goals rather than the potential impediments such as not having enough infrastructure.
Cloud facilitates this change in thinking, but it has failed to overcome the concerns around privacy, security, and data sovereignty. Despite all the advocates who have effectively said that the benefits outweigh the risks, the fact remains that some businesses stand to lose more than they can gain if their data is exposed. In some cases there are legislative impediments, PCI compliance, health records, national sovereignty rules to name a few, that render the potential gains seemingly academic. Further concerns around the high dependency on single Cloud providers have further limited the uptake.
But Rackspace has largely addressed these concerns by open-sourcing the Cloud. By working with NASA, Rackspace has given birth to what is now the fastest growing Open Source project in history – OpenStack. The OpenStack foundation now has more than 8600 contributing developers and has been adopted by IBM, Dell, HP, NTT, Red Hat, Canonical and more than a hundred other companies. Rackspace has very publicly gone “all-in” on OpenStack and is the largest contributor to the code base. Rackspace’s approach is that the Fanatical Support will be the key differentiator that enables the company to excel.
As a result of OpenStack, businesses have the freedom to build an infrastructure platform using a combination of public multi-tenanted Cloud infrastructure, dedicated hosted solutions, and private cloud facilities that are on their own premises if necessary. The technical barriers between each of these topologies are being eliminated, making for one platform that truly allows businesses to have the freedom from worrying about their infrastructure as they focus on driving their business forward.
The freedom to choose a mixture of topologies, suppliers and service levels really allows businesses to focus on what they do, not how they do it. Adding Fanatical Support to that freedom allows Cloud computing to fully realise its potential. And that excites me.
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Oh, and for those who want to understand more about my role at Rackspace, I have come on board as the Director of Technology and Product – Asia Pacific. My functions include promoting how Cloud computing concepts can help businesses achieve their goals, expounding on the concepts of the Open Cloud, as well as helping ensure new Rackspace products and services are ready for the market in the Asia Pacific region.
I welcome the opportunity to talk about my journey to the Cloud and how thinking Cloud and related topics such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and Social Media can change our approach to business.
Why I joined Rackspace Part I – the Company and its Values.
As one of the early Cloud adopters, and someone who has worked hard to promote what Cloud can bring to businesses, I was looking to join a vendor where I could leverage Cloud concepts to truly make a difference in the world. The more I looked, the more Rackspace seemed the right place to be.
The first thing that stood out to me was the company values. I was excited to see that the company places importance on the following values:
- Treating Rackers like family and friends
- Passion for all we do
- Commitment to Greatness
- Full Disclosure and Transparency
- Results First – substance over flash
- And, of course, Fanatical Support in all we do.
These formed a picture for me of an organisation that was striving to really make a difference. The word that stood out for me was the word “Greatness”. This is something that I personally believe in very strongly. Companies that are committed to Greatness are alive, vibrant and focused on growth.
Rackspace is best known for its Fanatical Support and I have to admit before I experienced it I thought it was just marketing hype. I was first exposed to it when Altium acquired a company and brought in a new head of IT who had experienced Rackspace’s Fanatical Support. His face was radiant as he described the fact that Rackspace knew about problems on his servers before he did. I was still pretty sceptical, but impressed with the positioning. I thought if a company can pull this off, it would make them really successful. I have always believed in providing phenomenal support, so I was impressed, but only in an intellectual way.
Then I joined the company. And what I found inside shocked me – here was a company that had inculcated the very idea of going above and beyond into the core of the company’s being. I went to the London office for my induction programme – five days of aligning new Rackers (Rackspace employees are called Rackers) to the fundamental principles that drive the business. There are over 1000 staff in the London office and I must have been approached half a dozen times by people asking me, “you seem lost – what can I do to help you?” This was no fake offer – each time this happened I was helped all the way to my objective, and the people always seemed eager to help.
Everything the company does drives this fanatical support. The company uses Net Promoter Score to measure the likelihood customers will refer others. But even the induction programme had us rookies being asked how likely we would be to recommend each of the presenters to our colleagues or friends. The presenters, we learned, were vying for a coveted internal trophy. I have never seen such engaging and creative presentations, all designed to prepare us to be able to be effective in the Rackspace culture.
The company’s mission is to be recognised as one of the world’s greatest service companies. And it shows.
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