Rackspace completes acquisition of Datapipe

Rackspace has completed its acquisition of managed services provider Datapipe to expand its services it offers through its end-to-end managed hosting and private cloud business.

The company explained its purchase would help more businesses move away from legacy, on-premise datacentres to cloud-based infrastructure, significantly improving how workloads are migrated and managed.

"This acquisition demonstrates our commitment to become the world's number one provider in IT as a service," said Joe Eazor, Rackspace's CEO."Datapipe brings important new capabilities to Rackspace that will enable us to better serve customers, globally and at scale. Together, we will build on the industry leadership both companies established in expertise, reliability, security and support, to create a new level of end-to-end customer experience."

The acquisition will also mean Rackspace can now offer customers access to its managed service offering on Chinese company Alibaba's Cloud, ensuring it can offer OpenStack, Oracle, SAP, and VMware solutions across the major providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform services.

It also gives Rackspace customers access to new data centres and offices in key markets, including the West Coast of the US, Brazil, mainland China, and Russia.

Rackspace explained Datapipe will become part of its business immediately, ensuring the managed service provider's customers are not affected. Joel Friedman will become chief technology officer of Rackspace, Dan Newton has been appointed senior vice president of account management and service delivery and Dan Tudahl will become general manager of Rackspace's government solutions division.

Rackspace's intentions to buy Datapipe were announced in September, although it hasn't yet been revealed how much the company has paid.

"Customers need guidance using public cloud infrastructure from Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure," Robb Allen, founder and CEO of Datapipe said.

"They also need help navigating the use of private clouds, managed hosting and colocation solutions, often in combination, as they move critical applications out of their corporate data centers. The combination of complementary capabilities and resources from both of our companies will create the world's leading provider of multi-cloud managed services."