Rackspace US, Incorporation.
(dba Rackspace)

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Type	Public company (NYSE: RAX)
Industry	Hosting
Founded	1998
Headquarters	5000 Walzem Road San Antonio, TX  78218
Key people	Richard Yoo, Dirk Elmendorf, Patrick Condon, Co-Founders Morris Miller, Graham Weston, Executive Chairman Lanham Napier, President, CEO
Revenue	$1.025 billion (2011)[1]
Operating income	$123.5 million (2011)[1]
Net income	$76.41 million (2011)[1]
Total assets	$1.026 billion (2011)[1]
Total equity	$599.42 million (2011)[1]
Website	http://www.rackspace.com

Rackspace US, Inc. (NYSE: RAX) is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands^[2] and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong as of late 2008. The company's email and apps division operates in Blacksburg, VA.

Its clients include 40% of the members of the Fortune 100.^[3] In 2011, the company was named as one of the top 100 places to work by Fortune Magazine.^[4] Rackspace UK has also appeared in The Sunday Times best employers' awards in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 and was listed in the top 50 UK workplaces by the Financial Times.

History [link]

In 1996, Richard Yoo started a small ISP called Cymitar Network Systems out of his garage apartment in San Antonio, Texas. The company quickly began doing application development work in addition to offering basic Internet access and web hosting. In 1997, Yoo brought on Dirk Elmendorf. When the company began to develop Internet applications as its primary business, the company was re-formed as Cymitar Technology Group. As Cymitar Technology Group grew, Patrick Condon was recruited from California and joined the team in 1998. Coincidentally, all three of the company's founders were students at one time at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Business model [link]

Rackspace has two main service-level segments: Managed and Intensive. Both service levels receive support via e-mail, telephone, live chat, and ticket systems, but they are designed to fit the needs of different businesses.

The Managed support level consists of "on-demand" support where proactive services are provided, but the customer is welcome to contact Rackspace when they need additional assistance.

The Intensive support level consists of "proactive" support where many proactive services are provided, and customers receive additional consultations about their server configuration. Highly customized implementations generally fall under this level of support.

Some services and products are only available for certain support levels.^[7]

Involvement with other companies [link]

Rackspace launched ServerBeach in San Antonio in January 2003 as a lower-cost alternative for dedicated servers designed for technology hobbyists who want flexibility and reliability. Richard Yoo was a catalyst in the startup of ServerBeach. A bandwidth and colocation provider, Peer 1 Hosting, purchased ServerBeach in October 2004 for $7.5 Million.^[8] Peer 1 Hosting entered the UK managed hosting market in January 2009 and the ServerBeach brand now competes directly with the UK arm of Rackspace, run by Dominic Monkhouse, former managing director of Rackspace Limited.^[9]

In October 2006, Mosso Inc. was launched, which experimented with white-labeling hosting services.^[10] Eventually, the division became the foundation for Rackspace's current Cloud Computing offering.

On October 1, 2007, Rackspace acquired Webmail.us, a private e-mail hosting firm located in Blacksburg, VA. Originally branded as Mailtrust on May 20, 2009, it became part of the newly formed Email and Apps division of Rackspace.

On October 22, 2008, Rackspace acquired Slicehost, a provider of virtual servers^[11] and Jungle Disk, a provider of online backup software and services.^[12]

Expansion into the Asia Pacific Region[link]

The company is experiencing heavy customer growth, especially in the Asian marketplace. The Asian office is a natural step in Rackspace.com's expansion outside the U.S. and London to cater for worldwide customers’ needs in Hong Kong / China Hosting. Rackspace selected Hong Kong as the Asia Pacific regional office in part because of its reputation within the global business economy, its world-class IT infrastructure, multiple telecommunication providers and rich talent pool. Rackspace also solicited feedback from its current customer base in the Asia Pacific region, and the majority of those respondents confirmed their preference for doing business in Hong Kong.

Recent news [link]

In 2008 Rackspace moved their headquarters from a building once occupied by Datapoint Corporation to the then-unoccupied Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest, Texas. Rackspace's Chairman, Graham Weston, owned the Montgomery Ward building in the mall until 2006, when it was sold to a developer. The city of Windcrest is purchasing 111 acres (0.45 km²) south of the mall to create a residential and retail complex.^[13] The facility is located next to Roosevelt High School, and many Roosevelt students intern at Rackspace.

The Fortune Magazine's "Top 100 Best Companies to Work For 2008" placed Rackspace as #32 the first year that Rackspace applied for consideration. The company was praised for its transparency. Regular "Open Book" meetings are held where the top level leaders share in-depth financial information with all employees.^[14]

On August 8, 2008, Rackspace opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RAX” after its initial public offering (IPO) in which it raised $187.5 million.^[15] The initial public offering included 15,000,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $12.50 per share.^[16] The IPO did not do well in the public market and lost about 20% of its initial price almost immediately.^[17]

On September 8, 2010, Rackspace received national attention when they decided to discontinue providing web hosting service to one of their customers, Dove World Outreach Center.^[18] This was in reaction to Dove World's pastor Terry Jones' plan to burn several copies of the Qur'an on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Rackspace claims that this violated their company policy. This move came under criticism, notably from Terry Jones himself, who described it as an "indirect attack on our freedom of speech." Others questioned the appropriateness of Rackspace's action, stating that there is "absolutely no reason for web hosts to have an editorial policy, and this only gives Jones more attention, and makes him look more persecuted."^[19]

On June 3, 2011, Rackspace intervened in an application by Queensland host Rack Servers to trademark its business name in Australia.^[20]

Acquisitions[link]

On October 22, 2008, Rackspace announced that it was purchasing cloud storage provider Jungle Disk and VPS provider SliceHost.

On February 16th, 2012, Rackspace acquired SharePoint911, a SharePoint consulting company based in Cincinnati Ohio.^[21]

Worldwide/EMEA [link]

Rackspace serves customers worldwide and has offices and data centers in the USA, Australia, United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong.

Rackspace is registered in the UK as Rackspace Ltd. and as of 2011 employs about 700 people, at an office (in Hayes, Middlesex) and a rented data center (in and around London). The company opened a fourth UK data centre in Slough, Berkshire in the second quarter of 2008. Rackspace UK has appeared in The Sunday Times best companies awards 2007,2008,2009,2010 and 2011 and was in the top 50 UK workplaces as seen in the Financial Times.

A few of the well-known large organisations served by Rackspace's UK web hosting services include Confused.com, Vue, Renault, online publication The Register, Huddle, Funny or Die, Metacafe, Suicide Girls, and net connect.

Rackspace Benelux in Amsterdam opened its offices in October 2007. It has won several high-profile customers such as LogicaCMG, Exact Software and CapGemini.

Rackspace Australia in Sydney opened its offices in March 2009. It has won several high profile customers and partners such as Westfield Holdings, Wotif.com, Sage Australia, Xero, Netstarter and Market Boomer.

See also [link]

• Rackspace Cloud - Rackspace's cloud computing hosting
• Jungle Disk - Rackspace's Online Storage and Backup for Personal and Home Office Use

References [link]

External links [link]

• Rackspace Website
• Rackspace Asia Pacific Office
• The Rackspace Cloud

Robert Scoble
Born	(1965-01-18) January 18, 1965 (age 47) New Jersey
Occupation	Video blogger, Rackspace
Known for	Blogging, advocating technology
Spouse	Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble

Robert Scoble (born January 18, 1965) is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. He has three children; one from a previous marriage and two with Maryam. He currently works for Rackspace and the Rackspace sponsored community site Building 43. He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel.

Early life and education[link]

Scoble was born in New Jersey in 1965, and grew up about a kilometer from Apple Computer's head office in Silicon Valley.^[1]

In 1989 while studying in West Valley Community College he met Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, and persuaded him to donate $40,000 worth of Macintoshes to the college journalism department.^{[2][non-primary source needed]}

In 1993 he dropped out without finishing his degree in Journalism from San Jose State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications (he still has one class to complete).^{[3][4][non-primary source needed]}

Career[link]

Scoble began his career in the 1980s helping run a discount camera store in San Jose (LZ Premiums). He sold cheap cameras with small or no profits, but made money from accessories.

After college he was working for Fawcette Technical Publications (as anything man - design, editing, helping plan the conferences like VBITS and VSLive!). His current wife Maryam was also working for Fawcette.

During the mid-1990s Scoble helped co-chair the Visual Basic SIG for SVForum, and was a frequent attendee and organizer for numerous local tech user groups.

In the late 1990s Scoble worked for Winnov (a manufacturer of webcams) supporting webcam users. During this time he was named a Microsoft MVP for his activity in Microsoft's NetMeeting support newsgroups, and for maintaining a NetMeeting information website.

He later left Fawcette and joined Dave Winer's UserLand Software, which was a content management and blogging software startup. He worked as a Director of Marketing. After the startup ran out of money, Robert worked for free for a month and eventually had to switch jobs.

He found a job at NEC Mobile Solutions as Sales Support Manager for TabletPC. His job responsibility was to answer all the phones and all the emails with support/sales requests. He had started using blogs to provide tech support and listen to feedback from NEC customers.

His blog was noticed by Vic Gundotra (then General Manager of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft), and Scoble accepted his offer to work at Microsoft.

Microsoft[link]

Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist

Scoble joined Microsoft in May 2003. He was part of the Channel 9 MSDN Video team, where he produced videos that showcased Microsoft employees and products.

Although Scoble often promoted Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, he also frequently criticized his own employer and praised its competitors (such as Apple Computer and Google). He was unusual in the level of access he offered to his users, which included publishing his cell phone number on his blog and urging people to contact him directly with issues, as well as accepting comments on his blog. His support for Microsoft in his blog, however, drew controversy and in February 2005, he became the first person to earn the newly coined moniker of "spokesblogger."

The Economist described Scoble's influence in its February 15, 2005 edition:^[5]

On June 10, 2006 Scoble announced^[6] he was leaving Microsoft to join Podtech.net as vice president of media development with a higher salary accompanied by "a quite aggressive stock option"^[7] offer that could make him wealthy if his new company succeeded.^[8][9] According to Alexa Internet that day had the biggest traffic to his blog and PodTech over their lifetime.^[10] June 28, 2006 was his last day at Microsoft.

PodTech[link]

In 2006 Scoble joined PodTech with the title Vice President Media Development. On Monday, September 25 he released his first episode of the "Scoble Show" at http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/.

Fast Company[link]

On December 11, 2007, while taking part in a panel discussion at the LeWeb3 Conference, Scoble inadvertently leaked news (by loading up a post on TechCrunch) that he would be leaving PodTech on January 14, 2008, and was likely to join Fast Company. He acknowledged the news on his blog on December 12 but stated that he had not yet signed on with Fast Company. He did a video interview about his plans here and leased studio space from Revision3.

On January 31, 2008, Scoble dedicated all his photos to the public domain.^[11]

On March 3, 2008, Scoble launched FastCompany.tv with two shows: FastCompany Live and ScobleizerTV. He characterizes the first as "a show done totally on cell phones." The second is similar to his previous show on PodTech, only with better equipment and a camera operator. The show is recorded with two cameras in 720p HD.^[12]

Though he no longer produces videos for FastCompany, he continues to write articles for their magazine.

Rackspace and Building 43[link]

On March 14, 2009, Scoble announced via his blog and on the Gillmor Gang that he was joining Rackspace. As part of his work there, he teamed up with the company to develop Building 43, a new content and social networking website.

Appearances[link]

On April 1, 2008, The Register ran an April fool's spoof claiming Robert Scoble was actually an IBM bot.^[13]

On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show at NewTeeVee Live^[14] featuring other internet celebrities such as Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Cali Lewis, Kevin Rose, Justin Kan, and others.^[15]

On November 6, 2006, Scoble appeared as a panelist on a CSPA^[16] event called "The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing on Media and Marketing".^[17]

Milliscoble[link]

In September 2008 followcost.com, a website which calculates how annoying it will be to follow anyone on Twitter, invented the milliscoble unit of measurement defined as: "1/1000 of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble as of 10:09 CST September 25, 2008." At that time, Scoble was averaging 21.21 tweets per day, so a milliscoble is 0.02121 tweets per day. A person with a milliscoble rating of 1000 will be as annoying to follow as Scoble.^[18]

Bibliography[link]

• Scoble, Robert; Shel Israel (January 2006). Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-74719-2. "We live in a time when most people don't trust big companies." 
• Foreword in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 2ed (2010)^[19]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Scoble

• Official website
• Scobleizer - Robert Scoble's Show on Spreaker.com
• ScobleShow - PodTech.net's ScobleShow
• Robert Scoble interview at Le Web3 in Paris France December 2007 video
• interview with Robert Scoble at Le Web 2008-Paris (with YouTube video)
• The Scoble Effect by Mark Fidelman