cloud
luminaries
Can you provide
Fanatical Support ®
for your customers,
24x7, 365 days a
year?
“With Rackspace Critical
Application Services, our
customers not only take
advantage of Fanatical
Support®, but also the
CA Technologies toolset
which is a really sophisticated
enterprise management suite.”
Steve Mills
CIO, Rackspace
We offer a 100% uptime guarantee which means
that we give double SLA credits whenever there’s any
downtime with Rackspace Critical Application Services.
About Rackspace
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Hosts enterprise-level services for businesses of all sizes
Founded in 1998
Based in San Antonio, Texas
Close to 200,000 customers worldwide
Over 4,500 employees For more information, visit rackspace.com
Cloud luminary / STeve mills / cio / rackspace
Career Highlights
• Started at Rackspace in 2010
• Formerly, VP of IT at T-Mobile
• Personal interests: snorkeling
and scuba diving
Steve Mills
CIO, Rackspace
Tell us about Rackspace and what makes it unique.
Rackspace is an open cloud company that operates globally. We offer a
variety of hosting options that range from private and public cloud services
to complex dedicated infrastructure configurations. We’re a $1 billion
company with close to 200,000 customers and 4,500 employees worldwide.
We give our
customers an
end-to-end view
of their entire
application stack.
If you look at hosting as a market, we think two things really differentiate us.
First is the number of options that we offer our customers. They can mix and
match dedicated infrastructure components with private cloud solutions and
public cloud solutions and connect those inside their firewall and potentially
even other hosting options outside of Rackspace. Our second differentiator
is what we call Fanatical Support. The way our customers describe our
customer service to me is that our system administrators become an
extension of our customers’ IT staff.
Can you describe Rackspace Critical Application Services offering and
the value it brings to customers?
Critical Application Services gives our customers an end-to-end view of their
entire application stack from the floor of the data center to the top of the
applications. With Critical Application Services, our customers not only take
advantage of Fanatical Support, but also the CA Technologies toolset which
is a really sophisticated enterprise application management suite including
CA eHealth, CA Spectrum, and CA Application Performance Management as
an integrated package.
Rackspace Critical Application Services is for customers with more complex
applications. The more complex an application becomes, the more important
it is to have an end-to-end view and to know holistically when something is
wrong within the stack so that you can quickly isolate the problem. I believe
the CA Technologies toolset that we offer really gives customers
that capability.
Another unique aspect of Rackspace Critical Application Services is that the
CIO no longer has to make a big application purchase and spend capital
upfront. With Rackspace Critical Application Services, customers can
experiment with different levels of services. They can start with modest
services and then increase the capacity of those services as they become
more comfortable or demand increases. We offer a 100 percent uptime
guarantee which means that we give double SLA credits whenever there’s
any downtime with Critical Application Services. That’s how confident we are
in our ability to execute with the CA Technologies toolset.
How are you using Critical Application Services internally?
As CIO of Rackspace, I started an internal program called Rackspace IT:
Journey to the Cloud, where we’re using our cloud products and offerings
to see how far into the cloud you can take enterprise IT. Critical Application
Services is a really big part of the this project. It’s been a transformational
exercise for us in understanding the cloud’s potential for enterprises.
To learn more
about Rackspace,
visit rackspace.com
One of the greatest benefits of our Journey to the Cloud project is that we no
longer need to keep our IT staff working around the clock to watch blinking
lights. As an internal customer of the service, there are a lot of advantages to
that. To the extent that I can offload tier one and tier two support and really
off hour support of Critical Application Services and have my deep subject
matter experts available on call, it takes a big load off of me and takes the
cost and complexity out of my world.
What are the biggest challenges that companies face when adopting
a cloud computing model?
To learn more from cloud
thought leaders working
with CA Technologies, visit
ca.com/cloudluminaries
Internal to the organization, I think one of the biggest challenges is fear. As
you move services into the cloud and off premise, I think people worry about
their jobs. In my opinion, with talent at such a premium and more than
enough work to go around, there’s a great opportunity to repurpose the skills
of the team and train them to be subject matter experts on the things that
differentiate you in the market.
I also think that cloud security is always going to be a concern. There’s been a
rush into the market by a lot of vendors offering a lot of solutions, but what’s
important is building comfort with the cloud. I think you build comfort through
experience. In the last year I’ve seen more and more IT shops experimenting
with cloud, getting their feet wet, and coming to understand how to manage
security risks and how to protect the data that they care about in the cloud.
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