Rackspace gives boost to its managed cloud services segment with Onica acquisition

Rackspace announced that it has agreed to acquire Onica, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider. This acquisition brings Onica’s professional services capabilities – including strategic advisory, architecture and engineering and application development – to the Rackspace portfolio, complementing its existing managed cloud services capabilities. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Onica has rapidly grown to more than 350 highly-skilled consultants across North America. 

The company holds nine AWS competencies across Data and Analytics, DevOps, Education, Healthcare, Industrial Software, IoT, Microsoft Workloads, Migration and Storage. Onica has been a regular on Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list and ranked fifth on the CRN® Fast Growth 150 list. 

As a cloud-native services company, Onica helps customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and deliver incredible experiences by bringing the innovative capabilities of the cloud to some of the most complex technology projects in the world.

“As a cloud pioneer, Onica has established itself as one of the largest pure-play AWS consultancies, with an unmatched reputation for true capability leadership with AWS and customers,” said Kevin Jones, CEO of Rackspace. “This acquisition will strengthen our ability to meet all of our customer needs on AWS, and together, we will have the most complete set of professional services and managed service capabilities in the industry. Rackspace is known for providing Fanatical Experience™ to its customers and Onica’s customer-first mindset is a natural culture fit. We are thrilled to welcome Stephen, Tolga and the talented Onica team to the Racker family.”

The demand for professional services for public cloud is rapidly growing and customers are continuing to adopt advanced cloud solutions. The acquisition of Onica will enhance and extend Rackspace’s offering to customers who are quickly maturing on AWS and seeking high-end professional services spanning the full spectrum of expertise in the cloud.

“By combining our capabilities with Rackspace’s global presence, resources and scale, we will be better positioned to achieve our mission of helping customers innovate using AWS,” said Stephen Garden, CEO of Onica. “We pride ourselves on delivering results for customers, and in Rackspace we have found a partner that shares our passion for providing a customer-obsessed experience.”

The transaction is expected to close in late fourth quarter of 2019. Garden and Onica chief technology officer Tolga Tarhan will continue to lead the Onica team, reporting to Sid Nair, general manager of Americas at Rackspace.

Both companies are privately held, with Rackspace owned by affiliates of certain funds of Apollo Global Management LLC and certain co-investors. Onica is a portfolio company of Sunstone Partners. Evercore acted as sole financial advisor to Rackspace on the transaction. Barclays acted as sole financial advisor to Onica.

CloudBees partners with Atos and VMware to provide DevOps automation for enterprises, give managed service for software delivery

CloudBees announced on Wednesday a partnership with Atos and VMware surrounding a solution to help customers adopt DevOps best practices at scale on Atos’ recently announced Atos Digital Hybrid Cloud (DHC) powered by VMware Tanzu and CloudBees cloud native continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) enterprise solution. 

With the adoption of this service offering, customers gain greater business agility, scalability and reduction in IT investments needed to build and automate software delivery pipelines.

The solution provides an end-to-end CI/CD automation platform that enables customers to integrate diverse software portfolios, from traditional applications to leading edge applications relying on a microservice architecture. Atos, CloudBees and VMware combined provide a turnkey, highly secure, DevOps solution offered as a managed service.

CloudBees, Atos and VMware offer a set of capabilities to organizations in their DevOps transformation journey that includes CloudBees Core that provides a shared, centrally-managed CI/CD service with self-service capabilities for engineering teams. 

CloudBees Core has cloud native platform support for PKS; Atos Application Transformation Services help teams modernize applications, as well as the way they are delivered and managed; and VMware Enterprise PKS is a turnkey solution that enables users to offer Kubernetes as a service with high availability, cluster scaling, health checks, self-healing and rolling upgrades.

“As forward-looking organizations continue to focus on digital transformation initiatives, they are increasingly seeking assistance from trusted service providers for the management of their DevOps operations,” said Francois Dechery, chief strategy officer, CloudBees. “This partnership represents a true industry first. By combining the power of a large managed service provider and a leading global cloud provider with our CI/CD solution, we’re helping customers to more effectively and efficiently modernize.”

With the adoption of the solution, customers gain increased productivity by minimizing application downtime, manual intervention, do-it-yourself scripting and troubleshooting. The solution provides faster time-to-value and greater operational efficiency to organizations looking to reliably and securely automate application delivery.

“As a global leader in digital transformation, we’re delighted to continue to build on our partnerships with CloudBees and VMware, two acknowledged experts in their respective fields,” said Michael Kollar, senior vice president for cloud engineering, Atos. “Using our Atos Digital Hybrid Cloud, powered by CloudBees, organizations can harness the power of DevOps, to transform application development methods from a traditional approach to a model that leverages the efficiencies of the cloud and the convenience of a managed service.”

OnApp releases Cloud Platform-as-a-Service that slashes time, cost and complexity of running own cloud platform

OnApp launched Wednesday Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), a new way for service providers and enterprises to get a ready-to-use cloud platform. 

OnApp CPaaS gives companies a complete cloud platform for running their own public, private or hybrid cloud services, without the cost and complexity of having to build, manage and support the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. 

The whole cloud platform is provided as a managed service. CPaaS is built with the OnApp Cloud platform, which automates all of the virtualization, software-defined storage and networking, provisioning, RBAC, template, pricing, backup and management functions that let users deliver public, private or hybrid cloud services. Everything is controlled through an intuitive, rebrandable control panel.

OnApp CPaaS offers automated deployment and configuration of the OnApp cloud management platform using hyperscale cloud infrastructure at AWS, datacenters from OVH, or the global network of OnApp clouds. 

The OnApp cloud platform combines virtualization, software-defined storage and networking, cloud orchestration, cloud management, metering and billing in one white label self-service portal. It also enables easy migration of workloads between different types of cloud infrastructure; with CPaaS, customers can take advantage of hyperscale performance without locking themselves into a single ecosystem.  

Three different CPaaS packages are available at launch. Each includes a full managed service package and an OnApp cloud control panel deployed at a customer's choice of AWS location. 

Customers then choose compute infrastructure according to their use case and price/performance needs CPaaS Light provides compute infrastructure from the cloud marketplace built into the OnApp cloud platform, with more than 40 locations available; CPaaS Pro offers dedicated compute infrastructure hosted at OVH, with a range of server sizes and locations available; and CPaaS Hyper provides compute infrastructure using bare metal servers at AWS, for the most demanding workloads. 

Each package is available now from OnApp. In future, customers will be able to order CPaaS Light and Hyper through a self-service cloud builder at cloud.net, for delivery in as little as two hours. OnApp plans to expand its range of CPaaS services in the future, providing similarly rapid delivery of other ready-to-use, ready-to-sell services.