Rackspace is planning to bring its Cloud infrastructure to the UK by the end of the year, according to EMEA Director, Fabio Torlini. He expects the company to announce the date when the infrastructure will be installed and ready for business “within the next few weeks”. Currently all the company’s Cloud service resources are based in the USA.
With the UK the company’s second biggest market after the US, the move is aimed at meeting the needs of UK and European users as its Cloud Computing business grows. It will also meet the growing need for some businesses to address increasingly stringent governance and compliance regulations, particularly in terms of the country where data is stored and processed and whether it crosses national boundaries.
“Cloud Computing for us is growing at 100% per year,” Torlini said, “and we are second only to Amazon in the cloud marketplace. We are also the largest provider of hosting services, and the overall business is growing at 18%. Perhaps the most important number is that the percentage of outsourced servers is still only 10% of the total installed base of servers, so the target is very big. We see the future economic situation pushing the growth of Cloud Computing at least as hard as it has over the last couple of years.”
He agreed that another potential driver of Cloud growth will be the potential for existing on-premise datacentres to require significant investment in server and storage system upgrades to match continuing performance demands from new operating systems, applications and tools at a time when investment funds are still tight.
As an idea of where this may lead, if the current Rackspace growth figures are maintained, it could see the company’s overall business all but double in five years, with Cloud Computing growing to represent over 80% of the total.
Keeping up with this growth rate is a major challenge for Rackspace, but Torlini sees the company managing it organically rather than by acquisition, though he does not rule out the possiblility. This is may become the tactic when it comes to potentially important non-English speaking markets. “We currently focus on the English-speaking markets but we are aware that in Europe markets such as Germany are growing fast,” he said. “We have acquired companies in the past, but this has primarily been for their technology or service offerings rather than market share. Our continued growth is based on the services we offer, such as our S3 storage product and our SaaS products and PaaS products.”
He also thought it unlikely that Rackspace would contemplate, at least for the foreseeable future, the route taken by Google in terms of building its own servers. “We buy from the major server vendors,” he said, “but we are able to negotiate on specification and price. So I don’t see us needing to go that far.”
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