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Google Cloud continues to build out channel capabilities across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), through the appointment of Rackspace as the region’s first managed services partner.
Targeting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers, the alliance expands on a global partnership, which was first revealed in March 2017.
Specifically, trans-Tasman GCP customers will soon have access to Rackspace’s customer reliability engineering (CRE) program, backed up by managed security services.
Revealed on the eve of Google Cloud Summit in Sydney, the combined offering is designed to deliver increased application “reliability and resilience”, in addition to enhanced cloud security across the enterprise.
“The strategic partnership with Google Cloud provides the Australian and New Zealand market with an incredible cloud technology platform, giving them more choice than ever before,” said Darryn McCoskery, general manager of A/NZ at Rackspace. “We’re focused on helping organisations de-risk their digital and cloud transformation journeys by being trusted advisors.
“We are taking the cloud transformation burden off their hands, using our deep cloud expertise – and now GCP’s unique capabilities - to help businesses focus on driving business growth and efficiencies.”
The partnership comes as more A/NZ businesses adopt GCP to run critical workloads, with the alliance set to offer added cloud architecture support, on-boarding and data migration expertise.
“The launch of GCP in A/NZ coincides perfectly with the expansion of our Google offering globally to deliver our new managed security and CRE services for GCP,” added Patrick Lee, global vice president and general manager of Rackspace managed services for Google Cloud Platform.
“This is another major step towards jointly driving stronger innovation and expanding our reach to Google Cloud customers around the world.”
Customer on-board
Australia-based online education provider Open Colleges - which also has operations internationally - will be the first local organisation to leverage the partnership.
“With more competition than ever before in the online education space, student experience, choice and the swift delivery of new digital offerings and features have become as important as the actual courses,” added Brett Rule, head of product and technology at Open Colleges.
According to Rule, Rackspace will help support Open Colleges’ “quick expansion” across new geographies and markets, alongside aiding the provider in the delivery of new courses and offerings to students.
“It will give us the scale and capability to better handle enrolment seasonality peaks, develop new product offerings, accelerate our go to market, optimise the enrolment experience, and offer our teams and students peace of mind when it comes to data security thanks to the native security functionalities offered by the Google Cloud Platform,” Rule added.
“The full support model provided by Rackspace will help us build the foundation of a strong new infrastructure network, and ultimately future proof our foundations and growth.”
The move comes two months after Google Cloud unveiled a fresh round of partner updates and enhancements following 12 months of growth through the channel.
Unveiled during the Partner Summit at Next ’18 in San Francisco, the vendor rolled out improvements across specialisation, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and technology integration, in response to an expanding ecosystem of partners both globally and locally.
“The partnership between Rackspace and Google Cloud will provide Australian organisations the assurance that they can optimise the full benefits of their move and presence in the cloud,” added Tim Dillion, founder and director at Tech Research Asia.
“As multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environments become the default approaches for businesses, they can also bring challenges around workload performance, applications integration and security and compliance requirements.
“Rackspace’s deep technical expertise and service capabilities in managing cloud environments combined with Google Cloud’s Australian cloud presence should provide a strong and compelling combination for Australian firms.”
