Welcome to the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Dan Hodek, who is the, product marketing manager of private clouds for Rackspace.

And Rackspace just changed its name now to Rackspace Technologies, I think, is official. Is that right?

That is correct. We are a Rackspace technology.

So I mean, specific to this idea of multi cloud and hybrid cloud, I mean, you know, you're in charge of marketing for private clouds. What is it that Rackspace does and is focused on today?

Well, you know, Rackspace originally started out as kind of a managed hosting company, and and we've evolved over time to the point that we are actually we are a multi cloud solutions company. Right? And our focus is on helping customers kind of in their journey to the cloud. And that's across both public clouds, private clouds, and even looking at into applications and data. So that's why, you know, when we think multi cloud, we don't consider just hypervisors and the types of private private clouds.

We also need to look at SaaS. I mean, those are now cloud type based services. We have expertise across all those areas. Right? So it's why we say we are a multi cloud solutions company as opposed to just a managed service provider.

Cloud journey is a relatively frequently used term. You know, multi cloud and hybrid cloud and private cloud, these have all become marketing terminologies. Within that space, though, I mean, why wouldn't a company do this themselves? I mean, they've got equipment on-site, and they say, hey. We can let's just take this and go put it in cloud vendor x or cloud vendor y.

And so what is what is the gap that Rackspace is filling there, and and, you know, what problem are you solving for these companies?

Cloud was great, right, for initially driving innovation. And I think what companies have found is there isn't one cloud that fits all. Right? There's not one location that that kind of fits all and is the best silver bullet. And what a lot of companies are are looking at is they're not sure where to run those workloads.

Right? Where to put their apps. Should they put them in public? Should they put them in private? They may have expertise in a in a particular cloud, particularly, say, enterprises, or they they may have expertise in, say, you know, their particular verticals.

What they don't have expertise is is across clouds or really identifying, the right places to run apps, run data where it makes sense for their business. And that's really where Rackspace comes in. We can provide the kind of like an unbiased but opinionated. And we say that, right, because we're not just coming in and going, hey, we're unbiased and you can go to any cloud. We're saying, hey, we're unbiased because we're not going to focus you on just AWS or on VMware or try and put you into Dell or HP.

We're going to say, hey, let's look at what your problem is. Let's ID where your apps and your data and what you're trying to do with security, and let's really look at what your plans are for the next 3 to 5 years and then go from there and put you into the right cloud structure. Right, if that makes sense. Or sometimes, you know, you may have legacy apps that it makes sense. You know, it's only gonna be around for a couple of years.

Keep it on premise. Right? And we can help customers identify the best places to run those workloads, the best places to run those apps, and then put them into the right cloud.

This isn't about, like, you know, if a company decides to go to CloudX, a CloudX necessarily wouldn't work for them. But maybe CloudY would have been better for them and cost less money or perform better or you know, fit a security model that's better? I mean, is that is that what we're talking about here?

Yes. Correct. Right? I mean, you kinda look at the best of breed. Certain clouds are maybe better for running analytics.

Certain clouds may be a bit better for putting your data or, storing your customer information. That is what you wanna do. Right? You wanna look at innovation and and not the infrastructure and keep your focus in in that in that realm. That's where Rackspace comes in.

Right? We can help you determine the best place to put that and really make it an ecosystem of ecosystems. Right? It should just really be cloud to you. There is no private.

There is no public that that debate should finally go away. Particularly when you come to a company like Rackspace, it should just be cloud, and you know that you're gonna get the best of breed technology for what you're trying to solve and and the, the workloads you're trying to put into market.

A few years ago, multi cloud and hybrid cloud and private cloud, I mean, these are really marketing terms I feel like being thrown out by a lot of companies and weren't really prevalent to the market. But nowadays, we really do see a lot of enterprises that are multi cloud and that are running hybrid cloud and are running private cloud. So how how do these terms I mean, not the multi cloud. Let's say hybrid cloud and private cloud. I mean, as it as it relates today, like, what is the difference between hybrid cloud and private cloud for somebody thinking about doing this or trying to figure out if they should do this or what is this?

Yeah. It's a good question. And and it's still a confusing, Ron. I mean, you can even look across the industry analysts on how they define multi and private and and hybrid is is different. We define private cloud as kind of a single tenant instance.

Right? It could be located in your data center, our data centers, colocation facilities. When you start to integrate your private cloud, that single tenant with a public cloud, that becomes in hybrid. Right? And you're you're using both multi tenant infrastructure with the public cloud and and a single tenant infrastructure with the hybrid cloud.

And, honestly, like, you know, when we talk to customers, private cloud should be synonymous with hybrid. Right? I mean, there aren't many people that are not using a public cloud provider. But in that same realm, we're also seeing customers kinda repatriate some of their public cloud workloads back into private. And and simply that's because they've they've realized, hey, this wasn't a Cloud native that happened in the first place, moved it out to public Cloud and going, I'm not getting the cost efficiencies and the performance I thought I was going to get.

Let's move part of that back to private and run part of it in public. And now you have a hybrid cloud model until they determine that, hey. Let's develop a cloud native type of an infrastructure and and move it all to public. But, really, private and hybrid, it they're it they should be synonymous. So, like, you shouldn't.

There aren't many companies that would just have a private Cloud. It just it wouldn't make sense. Right? Because you really need to be looking at where you're running look workloads and apps. I mean, you should always start the conversation with that.

You should always start thinking about what Cloud should I go to? What are you doing with apps and and data? Where do you wanna do your work? And that's what drives what cloud you go to.

Private cloud has I mean, you said single instance tenant or single tenant instance. And, you know, really people also talk about this in terms of bare metal. We go back in terminology, talk about a dedicated servers. I mean, this is really the business that Rackspace started in and got very large in and now has evolved into this this new thing, which is, okay, we have a lot of expertise running lots and lots and lots of server equipment in data centers across the world. Now you can do these other things with it, which is, you know, you're not buying 1 or 2 servers.

You're buying some unit of computer, some unit of storage. That leads me to, you know, a really big question here, which is, as all of these cloud ecosystem partners are evolving and more and more companies are getting into the spaces of the, you know, CSPs and whatnot, Why Rackspace as a service provider versus somebody else? What is Rackspace bringing to table that differentiates you that makes you, you know, the the best in this space?

I think there's a few factors. One, I think, is our breadth and depth of our portfolio and and globally. Right? So our our reach globally. We've got, you know, over 40 data centers around the world.

And the fact that we we offer solutions on VMware, which include their SDDC, includes VMC on, AWS. It includes, you know, even like server virtualization. We have offerings on Microsoft with Hyper V and and Azure Stack. We have OpenStack. We are the creators of OpenStack.

Right? And we we do that both Ansible and with Red Hat. And we offer bare metal. Right? And and we can even offer customized solutions within that.

So just the breadth within that private Cloud portfolio and then you extend that to the hypervisors across AWS, Google, and Azure. Our expertise, right, again, is is focused on putting you into the best Cloud and the best platform that you need in in our reach. Outside of that, you know, again, we we take this this unbiased view of providing that information to you. Right? And I think then to what we have done recently is we've come up with something called service blocks.

And industry analysts are even saying this is kinda revolutionizing the great new way to look at it. The idea behind Service Blocks is you don't need to buy the whole the whole basket of eggs. Right? Like, you you can buy certain components within cloud and the services you need for the time and where you are on that journey and then and only pay for those types of services. Right?

So that's really a differentiator for us too is we're trying to charge our customers only for what they're using at that time and give them the opportunity to move to a new block. Right? Like, they may not need architecture and consulting midway through the project. They got that at the beginning. We can come in and we can help them optimize.

Right? And so what we do is we break up our services into what we call these service blocks, kind of Lego fitting pieces that customers can use and it it cuts down cost. Right? It helps them optimize their infrastructure and helps them optimize the service overall.

Going back to the dedicated server days, you know, it's not it's not unusual for a company or customer to say, I need 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 servers. And when you look at the hyperscale of public cloud today, it's not unusual to see a company that's spending, you know, 1,000,000 or tens of 1,000,000 of dollars per month with a public cloud defender. I mean, this is a pretty big range now of addressable market. So who are your customers? I mean, what does your customer profile look like within that space?

Are you still dealing with, you know, onesie twosie dedicated server customers as well as multimillion dollar month cloud spends, or are you have you started narrowing down on a more specific view within that?

I would say that it is we have expanded our view. Right? Like I said, we we were our bread and butter initially was was helping out customers, like, particularly in the SMB market. But we have expanded, I mean, in in, into enterprise, right, in commercial markets and mid market. Those are the custom and it varies.

Right? When you look at an SMB customer, they're coming to us because they don't have that full expertise or they don't need, they don't have an IT organization to actually help to support them. So they'll want a full white glove managed service. Right? And we can provide that to them all the way up to the enterprise where those customers are really need to look at innovation and not infrastructure.

That's what they need to focus on. Right? The you know, all companies, you know, enterprise to mid market, they have expertise and then they have knowledge in in managing, infrastructure, but that's not valuable to driving their business forward. Right? To me, that that those are the chores, right, of IT not, in what they really need to be focused on is kind of what is gonna drive my business forward.

So from an enterprise standpoint, the value right there is they can offload those chores in essence of infrastructure management to a company like Rackspace and then focus their IT organizations on innovation and and driving their business, their goals. Right? So what are the mission critical applications a health care provider may need to go and develop and focus on? So that that really is kind of, I think, the gambit. I don't know.

You know, it's it's always bad to say, yes. We we sell to everybody. Right? It it it varies because, our services can provide that way. We can provide the white glove all the way to the, hey.

All you need is for us to come in and and manage your infrastructure, Then, the patching, the type of maintenance, we can do all that depending on what your business needs are.

What I'm hearing you say is this is more about, I have an application. It's running somewhere now. I wanna run this application in a different place. What is the best place to run that application? I need help figuring that out, and then I need help optimizing it.

And I need help making sure that it's it's continuing to run, you know, now and tomorrow and the next day and the next week and the next month, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

That is exactly right. Right? And I and I think that that is a differentiator for us as well as unlike some, you know, typical system integrators or other types of, service providers, we don't just come in and and help you determine and and then implement the solution. We continually work with you to optimize it over your lifetime of your life cycle of the the application and the workload. So what may work today for a company may not be the best place to locate the data in the apps 6 months, a year, 2 years from now.

We have the ability, right, to, to move those workloads to the right platform when it's needed. Basically, you may go through an, you know, an acquisition or a merger, and it may make sense to expand your footprint. And so now you need to, possibly move it out of a private cloud into a more robust public cloud or something like that. So we're able to do that. We're able to help customers determine not only initially when we go in where they should be running, their workloads, but continually optimize that over the life of their business.

Something you touched on earlier, Dan, was this single invoice regardless of where you didn't say cloud agnostic, but you basically said what the customer cares about is go and be in the cloud, not which cloud. And Rackspace provides a, you know, single n t a single invoice back to the customer. And when we look at the CSP market, we see lots of companies that are focused. Maybe they're an AWS and VMware provider, or they're an Azure specific provider and then maybe Azure plus VMware, or it's they're focused on Google. And this is pretty unique for for Rackspace.

And the fact that you do support such wide variety, you know, beyond all the major public clouds, but also the VMware, and then as well as private cloud and hybrid cloud and your OpenStack cloud, etcetera. And we we we should talk about this a little bit more because that has a lot of interesting value as well for a company of saying, I don't know really where I wanna be or if I'm gonna make the right choice or if I wanna be this place a year from now or 18 months from now. But from Rackspace perspective, you can move somebody, and this isn't like reaching a contract and and establishing a new contract. You say, oh, you know, you're you're running here, and we wanna run you here instead now. Let's just move you over to this other thing.

Right?

Correct. And that that is the you know, you have to look at the back office and the simplification of just of operations. Right? But what we're able to do is because we can provide that, not only the single invoice, but the the single support number that you call. Right?

You're not having to call AWS or and Azure or VMware and Dell. Right? You you call Rackspace. And it's because of our deep relationships. A big piece of of our value too is just not the fact that we have we offer expertise across these hubs, but it is also the deep integration and the relationships that we've established with those partners, right, that benefit the customer.

So we kinda have that that red phone, that bat phone that we can pick up and and we could call AWS and or Dell or or VMware and and get the deep insights and support that we need that a customer might be able to have the access to. So, you know, it goes beyond just the the single source of a bill or a single number to call. It also delves down kind of into the value that we have and the relationships we've built across the board, like in the deep engineering or or else in beta customers for a lot of these, the hyperscalers and and, private cloud providers. So there's a deep value in that relationship that a customer may not be able to get on their own as well.

And there's a lot of longevity here. I mean, we're talking about your, you know, employee base. And it's not unusual to see people 10, 15, 20 years

with Rackspace. Yeah. No. We've we've they've got flags that we hang all over our corporate offices that say, you know, 20 year Racker. I that's a color sell set of rackers.

So, no, the the the longevity, I mean, that that's a a great value to them. I'm glad you pointed that out. It's just the, what we invest in our employees and what the company has invested in employees, not only from, you know, making them a great working environment, but just the the educational opportunities that we we have our, engineers and our support teams go through is is just, you know, just it's unprecedented. I mean, honestly, for been in the tech industry for over 20 years, and I've never seen a company invest so much time in in ensuring that their their employees in the right areas were certified, right, in the in the right levels and that they had and they continued multiple certifications. You know?

That's a a great area to look into. It's just the fact that when you talk to some of our, engineers or support architects, they're not just qualified in AWS. They have qualifications in AWS, maybe in Azure or AWS and VMware. And why is that important? Well, it's because they understand then the the intricacies of how those multiple clouds work together.

And so they're able to kinda think outside of the box to go, well, maybe that's not the best way to do it because Rackspace is invested in in getting, you know, these people educated and and certified in the right means.

You know, there's a there's a difference between if a company has already migrated to cloud or if they're thinking about migrating to cloud at this point. You know, regardless of that, if a company has either made a change or or is thinking about making a change and has come to that determination of we need some help here, What should they expect engaging Rackspace and and how you know, what does that onboarding process or what does that initial evaluation process, you know, look like? What what should they be prepared to do and and walk through with you?

We'll always start looking from a process standpoint. Right? And we'll always bring in a, you know, probably a professional services organization to sit down with the customer and identify their problems and what they're trying to solve rather than looking at it from a technology, like what technology do you wanna go to. Customers also have the opportunity depending on where they're at to to purchase our service blocks. Right?

So we have service blocks that that start with something called, you know, we call it platform essentials, right, which is kind of the basics of you get an enterprise technical account manager who's available, you know, 24 by 7 by 365 to help kinda troubleshoot and address questions. You know, and that'll come with, say, cost optimization tooling. Right? Well, they'll come in and they'll do some initial analysis of where you can optimize your costs to you know, if a customer has already passed that mode, they they may want something more like our complex operations. Right?

Where we can actually come in and and start right there where it provides like a certified cloud engineer and it's based on, you know, various hours that you would need that engineer all the way up to, do you want a dedicated resource 24 by 7 by 365? And that that's a great advantage that Rackspace has has provided to our their our customers is the fact that they don't need to buy the essential platform essentials and the, complex operations. Right? They're not gonna need to have both of those at the same time. They can buy those in in what we call service blocks, and we can start the conversation at depending on where they are on their journey and what they need.

But we will always start the conversation with, what are you trying to solve? I mean, let's not look at the technology. Let's put that aside. What's the problem? And then we can help you engineer the right solution.

What are you trying to solve? I love that. Well, Dan, thank you so much for your time. Sure we could spend a lot more in the future. This is there's there's too much here to cover, but I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

There is a lot. Take care.

Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.