Former chief customer officer aims to shake off investor doubts about Rackspace’s cloud service fortunes.
Rackspace has named chief customer officer Taylor Rhodes its new president after a six-month stretch within which its CEO Lanham Napier served in both roles.
Rhodes’s ascension is an indication that Rackspace wants all executive positions filled and all hands on deck because it battles for market share against Amazon, Google, and other cloud service providers. Investors appear pessimistic: Rackspace stock dropped from $36.59 to $35.83, off 2%, at the news. It’s well below 1/2 its 52-week high of $81.36 per share.
CEO Napier assumed the president’s post on the end of July when Lew Moorman, president and chief strategy officer, resigned. Moorman remains a member of the board but left his position “to spend more time with my family,” consistent with a blog he posted July 25. Moorman’s wife had just completed a successful cancer surgery, and his eldest daughter was facing continuing illnesses.
[Learn more about how Rackspace’s OpenStack team broke new ground. See 9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers.]
Rhodes said in an interview with InformationWeek that restoring value to Rackspace’s stock depends on investors seeing Rackspace management “execute against a method.” And that strategy would be “geared to service leadership within the industry built on fanatical support.” The “fanatical support” phrase has accompanied Rackspace’s expansion from hosted-enterprise (still nearly all of its business) into the cloud market.
Rhodes said Rackspace is finding success with both new cloud and existing hosted service customers. Many hosted service customers want the commodity infrastructure and lower prices of cloud computing, but additionally they wish to retain the choice of operating their very own private, managed servers and applications alongside the general public cloud. The hybrid option of single-tenant servers alongside multitenant servers is likely one of the basic appeals of Rackspace’s combined business, he told us.
Rhodes has held a lot of executive positions in his seven years at Rackspace, primarily in sales, marketing, and customer service. Ahead of becoming chief customer officer, he was senior VP and managing director of Rackspace’s international unit. Subsequently, he brings an extra set of skills to the post in comparison to Moorman, a Stanford law school graduate.
Rhodes “has generated strong growth in all of the businesses he has led. Our international business, for instance, grew 30% a year under his leadership,” said Napier in announcing Rhodes’s appointment.
But Rackspace’s challenge is convincing a broader segment of consumers that it is going to compete as Amazon keeps up a drumbeat of recent service offerings and lower prices. Rackspace Cloud was criticized for a narrower feature offering and slow growth by financial service analysts, who don’t see it keeping pace with Amazon.
However, one analyst cited a contemporary Red Hat statement that its growth in Enterprise Linux customers reflects increasing use of the Rackspace Cloud.
Rhodes picked up on that time by saying Rackspace acquired ObjectRocket last February “for an undisputed expertise in running MongoDB” for giant data analysis as portion of its customer cloud services. Rackspace will continue so as to add services to its infrastructure-as-a-service and “offer a hybrid set of options that give the client your only option” of combined services, he said.
Rhodes joined Rackspace in 2007 as head of sales and support. He went directly to launch Rackspace Enterprise Services, which served larger customers. Previously, Rhodes worked at EDS, managing relationships with large global customers. He’s a former US Marine Corps infantry officer and holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Taylor’s appointment “represents a successful example of the company’s long-term talent-development plan,” Napier said within the announcement.
Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.
Private clouds are moving rapidly from concept to production. But some fears about expertise and integration still linger. Also within the Private Clouds Step Up issue of InformationWeek: The general public cloud and the steam engine have more in common than you may think. (Free registration required.)
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