The Rackspace Cloud posted a net revenue of $56.4 million in 2009 — an increase of almost 125% from 2008. Impressive. But the company will need partners to help maintain that type of growth. With that goal in mind, the cloud hosting provider has launched a partner program to keep that ball rolling. Read on for details.
Parent company (and web hosting giant) Rackspace revamped its own partner program back in December of 2009, so it’s no surprise that as cloud services account for an ever-increasing amount of their business, The Rackspace Cloud would follow suit.
The highlights of the new partner program, directly from The Rackspace Cloud’s press release:
- The Rackspace Cloud Reseller Program offers discounts of up to 12 percent for resellers selling large volumes of cloud hosting across Rackspace Cloud’s services including the recently announced Cloud Servers for Windows Beta. The popular Windows beta is allowing users to take advantage of Cloud Server’s new and existing features including control panel and API access for create, delete, reboot, and rename functions.
- The Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program members can earn from 5 to 7 percent (depending on the total number of referrals) of a referred hosting customer’s payments for a period of up to three years.
The company claims that their new partner program was designed to offer maximum flexibility for solutions providers. Partners will have access to web portals for tracking and reporting, webinars and marketing material, co-marketing opportunities, and open access to The Rackspace Cloud’s APIs to build services on top of. The Rackspace Cloud will also provide end-user billing and support services.
If The Rackspace Cloud is gunning for Amazon EC2‘s top spot in the cloud computing market, a strong partner program is a good way to help them get there. Of course, cloud hosting rival Terremark also has a partner program, so The Rackspace Cloud may well have a fight for the channel on its hands.
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They need vars but they need to give them links to tech support. I have dealt with Rackspace for a client. When I was moved up the tech support chain. I got good answers. But it takes too long to move up that chain. Same problem all large providers. The problem I see is that there are more and more people that do not understand the technology and it takes too much time and energy to solve issues.
Also, the “Cloud” was too slow for the client. Just in basic document saves, you can see the difference. And this was with a 3Mb pipe. I am moving their “Cloud” into their own office. With the drop in hardware prices. They will have redundancy and see an ROI in 1 year versus the rental. You add our services and monitoring it will be cheaper in the long run for them.
Victor: Thanks for the healthy debate. The VAR Guy recently moved his own site to RackSpace Cloud. So far, so good. But you’re right: You need to know the right people in RackSpace (and other service providers, for that matter) during the tech support emergencies. Before moving to RackSpace Cloud, The VAR Guy had multiple conference calls with RackSpace to see if the company really understood The VAR Guy’s applications. So far the answer is yes…
-TVG