Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 21 | Page 48

CIO opinion However, to draw on a couple of examples, we have some customers’ whose business is doing so phenomenally well that they need support in ensuring their IT infrastructure is able to support it. For example, Boozt is one of the fastest growing online fashion and beauty companies, which found the demands on its systems were increasing in line with its popularity – particularly around peak periods. To support the company’s small team in managing the growth in and influxes in traffic, we worked with Boozt to migrate to Google Cloud Platform. This helped it manage a 40% hike in customer visits over this particular period – equating to around 50,000 new customers – without a minute of downtime or any performance issues. Whereas for Trading Point, a large and well-established international investment online brokerage firm, the internal IT team needed to focus on driving value back to the business’ core competencies, so the company started looking for a strategic partner to take on the management of hardware infrastructure and support the firm in the maintenance of its systems. High reliability and low latency are key to ensuring that Trading Point is able to continuously deliver its superior service to its customers. So, for Rackspace, the challenge lay in ensuring that the IT infrastructure was scalable, optimised and secure. Rackspace recently announced a significant expansion of its operations in Europe. How do these European markets differ and why did Rackspace choose to expand in these areas? Last year, we announced that Rackspace would be embarking on its most ambitious EMEA expansion plan to date, investing heavily in growing its footprint in Germany and Northern Europe – something that I am personally very excited about. One reason for this expansion is that we’ve seen massive demand from German companies for local expertise, as well as having the breadth, depth and scale to support them at every stage in their cloud journey. Traditionally in Germany, many firms have been slower to start out on their cloud journey and with their high focus on data security and privacy, having that local support and expertise has been an important factor to reassure them that they’ll still be 48 INTELLIGENTCIO able to provide the same level of service and data protection to their customers. In the Netherlands, however, the market is a little more mature, with many companies having already embarked on their cloud journey. With our customers in this area, we saw heightened demand to support them as they take their next steps on their cloud adoption journey and in helping them understand how they can use it to improve sales and drive greater revenue. What trends are impacting CIOs the most and how is Rackspace supporting customers? One of the biggest challenges CIOs face is ensuring they’re able to deliver value from their cloud and Digital Transformation projects at cost. A recent global survey of business and IT leaders found that several years into their migration, 40% of businesses said their cloud migration costs were still higher than expected. Ensuring that our customers are able to use their budget to best accelerate the value of the cloud in their organisation is key. One way we’re assisting them with this is through the launch of our new subscription cloud model, Service Blocks. This works similarly to bolt-on data plans, where you can increase your service based on your immediate needs. For your mobile this might be more data to entertain your kids on a long card journey, in the cloud this could be providing additional expertise to support you in a specific project – whether that’s a ‘Cost Governance as a Service’ or ‘Solution Architect as-a-Service’ to build complex cloud architectures. Lowering the barrier to consume these new services will enable our customers accelerate their value to the cloud and ensure that they have the right support when embarking on more complex tasks. Six week waits for statements of work are now dead. We know our customers crave flexibility, the ability to scale up and down and customisable offerings – whether that’s in their operations, resource requirements or service engagements – and that its ultimately critical for their success in the cloud. n www.intelligentcio.com