AWS, Rackspace Deal Is Imminent

Friday's Wall Street Journal report about the impending partnership between Rackspace Hosting and Amazon Web Services set off a fresh round of media speculation about the significance of such a deal for both cloud providers.

CRN first reported Amazon's plans to partner with Rackspace in July.

Maybe the Wall Street Journal hadn't noticed the original report that a partnership was in the works, but Wall Street certainly did: Rackspace stock rose 5 percent on the CRN exclusive.

[Related: Rackspace Introduces Managed Security, Compliance Services]

Back in July, a channel partner of both AWS and Rackspace told CRN the San Antonio-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service and co-location provider approached his company with an offer to participate in a beta program in which Rackspace would manage and provide support for his customers hosting workloads in Amazon's cloud.

The channel source said the plan was for Rackspace to "wrap their managed Fanatical Support around AWS and essentially become an Amazon reseller."

Rackspace already has a similar deal with Microsoft to manage customers using the Azure cloud.

Through the partnership, which will be announced formally next week during the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Rackspace will offer its highly regarded technical support, marketed under the Fanatical Support branding, to workloads deployed in Amazon's league-leading cloud.

PUBLISHED OCT. 2, 2015