Rackspace has outlined expansion opportunities in Asia as the managed cloud provider strengthens IT-as-a-service capabilities across the region.
The provider has now successfully integrated the people, capabilities and data centre infrastructure from its 2017 Datapipe acquisition, the largest acquisition in the company’s history.
“With its recent strategic acquisitions, Rackspace is uniquely poised to tackle the growing needs of its Asia region customers,” Rackspace Asia vice president and general manager, Colin Chan, said.
As digital transformation takes hold across Asia, Rackspace has identified “significant” regional growth opportunities in 2018 and beyond.
“We see tremendous growth opportunities for Asia and we’re looking forward to continuing our emphasis on the region in the coming years,” said Chan, who previously held the position of vice president and general manager of Datapipe Asia.
For Rackspace has long-standing partnerships with VMware and OpenStack as well as public cloud infrastructure platforms such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
Furthermore, the cloud provider also offers managed services for enterprise applications in the Oracle and SAP ecosystems for digital marketing and e-commerce.
“Organisations across Asia Pacific are increasingly adopting cloud technologies and infrastructure to enable digital transformation,” said Nishchal Khorana, director of emerging technologies, Frost & Sullivan.
“Public, Private and Hybrid cloud architectures are enabling organisations to build more agile infrastructures and overcome challenges associated with traditional on-premise deployment models.”
The growing preference for a hybrid cloud model in the enterprise is a significant opportunity for the company, as organisations across the region embark on digital transformation journeys.
In line with digital disruption, the company recently announced the launch of Kubernetes-as-a-Service, an open source technology opening up an easier path to adopt containers.
Specifically, containers enable a much smoother workflow for development and deployment applications - it simplifies the development process greatly by acting to isolate software and any associated dependencies in one bundle.
Still in its nascent stages, container technology is growing in popularity for its many benefits, not least its ability to improve scalability and lower costs.
The application container software market is expected to grow 40 per cent over the next few years to nearly US$3 billion in 2020.
Kubernetes, being an open-source platform, has grown in popularity since its creation in 2015, and is seen as a leading container orchestration technology for managing production workloads.
Other firms such as Google, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco already offer Kubernetes. Rackspace will be the latest firm to do so.
Kubernetes is a competitor to other container technologies such as Docker and Mesos.
