The leading multi-cloud managed services company
The Customer
Rackspace, the leading multi-cloud managed services company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it all on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialised expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies including AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenStack, Oracle, SAP and VMware.
The Challenge
Rackspace recognised that their customers needed help in demonstrating the value of a migration to the cloud through a Managed Service provider. While many organisations can demonstrate physical savings around licensing and hardware to support a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation, the ‘human cost’ was more complex, a cost that is often overlooked but critical in identifying the real benefits and true cost of a move to cloud.
The Solution
LINQ’s Information Supply Chain solution built templates of a ‘Do-it-Yourself’ current state view to migration to the cloud and a comparative view if a Managed Service Provider undertakes those tasks. The model identified the associated costs and time to perform migration activities. The outputs are used by Rackspace customers to help build the internal business case for a cloud migration.
The Benefits
Hiring, retention and ongoing training of IT talent to stay on top of constantly evolving cloud technologies is a considerable strain on any IT department. Subsequently, the true impact of this ‘human cost’ is very difficult to prove and substantiate. LINQ offer Rackspace the ability to comprehensively show the impact of their migration and support capability in terms of expertise, time saved and faster delivery of customer outcomes.
Our customers were looking for help to support a commercial rationale in moving to the cloud. LINQ provided a benchmark of the ‘human costs’ associated with such a move thereby offering compelling proof of the value of our migration expertise.
Angus Dorney
General Manager & Senior Director, ANZ
The Rackspace Story
Global businesses need the freedom to modernise their IT and put their workloads where they’ll fit best. But selecting the right platform, architecting a multi-cloud solution and modernising operations is complex and difficult to handle alone. The cloud is complex. Rackspace help accelerate growth and innovation at any point in an organisation’s cloud journey by handling the migration details and providing ongoing management and optimisation, to allow customers to focus on their core business.
An organisation typically has two choices; perform the migration themselves (DIY), or contract a third party to do it for them. When it comes to systems, hardware and licensing, assessing the cost of a migration is more black and white. But when it comes to assessing the ‘human cost’ of a cloud migration, the impact on the people within an organisation is much harder to determine.
LINQ is being utilised at Rackspace to model the actions needed by people in the business to perform a cloud migration. The model maps available skills, training requirements, time to implement, recruitment costs, etc. as well as the length of activities required to complete a migration. This is then compared from an internal perspective (a DIY approach) against the pool of talent and expertise within Rackspace to deliver the same outcome.
By generating templates for the current state of a business with on-premise infrastructure and applications, the cost of a DIY migration, the cost of a managed service migration and the outcome of the resulting implementation, LINQ has enabled the true human cost of migrating to the cloud to be understood for inclusion in any TCO outputs required.
“Being able to pivot around people in an organisation and show the impact of a migration on their day-to-day workload is invaluable” said Angus Dorney, General Manager for Rackspace in Australia and New Zealand. “It allows us to provide the evidence to support the claims that we make about the service we offer as well as give customers the justification they need to bring changes to their IT strategy. LINQ has enabled us to better describe the value we deliver to our customers.”
Rackspace is looking to evolve this capability with LINQ to build further templates which will describe additional migration scenarios to assist customers with more bespoke human costs outputs. The value to Rackspace customers is to provide larger customers who typically have more complex migration projects, more granular insight into the human cost of a move to cloud and it’s possible impact on their business.
LINQ undertook their own analysis of a DIY vs. Managed Service Provider scenario. The results of this were overwhelmingly in favour of Rackspace. You can view that case study here.
