Rackspace Managed Services for Google Cloud Platform

Expect Rackspace Fanatical Support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) later this year. Indeed, Rackspace has confirmed a strategic partnership with Google to become the first managed services support partner for GCP.

Of course, the term "first" is somewhat relative. Plenty of MSPs support customers on Google Cloud. But Rackspace's relationship with Google involves a formalized support relationship with the search giant.

The managed services will span:

In addition, the companies are working extend on-call engineering support to the businesses' shared customers.

"Rackspace already has Google Certified Professionals on staff, and we will continue to work together to roll out managed services for GCP," Benjamin Smith, director of Google Cloud Engineering Support, said in a prepared statement.

The Partnership: What It Means

The  combination of Rackspace's Fanatical Support culture with Google's Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) is an "important step forward" in the delivery of enterprise-ready support for GCP customers, 451 Group asserts.

Momentum around GCP is building, Patrick Lee, general manager of Rackspace's Google business, asserted in a prepared statement. He pointed out that more businesses are moving their workloads to GCP, and Rackspace will be able to provide these companies with expertise and support along the way.

"By providing Fanatical Support for Google Cloud, we will be able to help deliver value to joint customers and help them meet their evolving business needs," he stated.

Still, it's difficult to pinpoint Google's overall cloud momentum. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are widely perceived as the IaaS market share leaders. But Google spent most of last week describing partner and customer gains at the NEXT17 conference.

Rackspace for Google, AWS and Azure

Rackspace already offers managed services for AWS and Azure. Among the recent highlights: Achieving seven gold and three silver Microsoft Partner Competencies for managed services in several areas, including:

Although Rackspace's managed services for AWS and Azure are growing, those revenue streams aren't large enough to fully offset weak areas of the company's business. The company went private in 2016 and recently announced 6 percent layoffs across the United States.