All of us at SharePoint911 are now Rackspace employees! Please allow me to rewind the clock a little…
You know things are going to get interesting when the owner of the small business you work for sets up a mandatory “all hands” meeting in the middle of the Christmas to New Year’s vacation time. The employees start to speculate what the news could be, and then we hear the words “The company has been sold”. After we all wake up from our individual panic attacks, we learn that one of our favorite partners, Rackspace is purchasing the company and we all need to be in San Antonio ASAP to discuss what this means. A bit of a shock given that we were all hoping for a calm start to 2012 (after the really busy 2011 we had).
We visited their corporate offices, which btw are in an old decommissioned shopping mall. From the outside it looks like any other out of business shopping center, but inside they have built a giant dotcom environment with café’s, a tether ball court, Zen meeting spaces named after game show and cereals, and even a twisty slide that you can take instead of the escalator if you desire.
That was very impressive, but the icing on the cake was seeing how amazing Rackspace as a company truly is. They are a publicly traded company that is committed to what they call Fanatical Support. In other words, rather than just say they want to be the best at customer service, they live and breathe making the customer feel awesome about working with them. They have been hosting SharePoint sites for a while now, and with our acquisition they want to become the leader in Fanatical SharePoint across the board. This doesn’t mean that all our customers need to even host at Rackspace! We will be servicing SharePoint projects (and my team will be branding them to not look like SharePoint) whether you host somewhere else or even on your own premises… but now we can also offer world class SharePoint hosting at Rackspace if you need it.
With anything like this, the future is not 100% written yet. But I’m really excited to be working with Rackspace and even more excited to be able to have their much bigger engine behind us. They are committed to keeping all the awesomeness of SharePoint911 while providing all the resources we need to take things to the next level. I can’t think of a better company to have bought us out!
Here is the official press release, wordsmithed much better than I ever could by profession marketing boffins:
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-sharepoint911-to-the-rackspace-family/
Also, here is a cool video of a day at the Rackspace offices. I won’t be located there, but I look forward to visiting throughout the year:
