{"id":40028,"date":"2019-08-07T09:24:54","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T08:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/2019\/08\/07\/industry-expert-reveals-the-secret-to-customer-success-in-the-cloud\/"},"modified":"2019-08-16T15:24:44","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T14:24:44","slug":"industry-expert-reveals-the-secret-to-customer-success-in-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/2019\/08\/07\/industry-expert-reveals-the-secret-to-customer-success-in-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Industry expert reveals the secret to customer success in the cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Business transformation is crucial to survival in modern industry as new technologies revolutionise the way we operate. Lee James, CTO EMEA at Rackspace, discusses how the company is helping its customers accelerate their value to the cloud and ensure they have the right support in place for their transformation journey \u2013 critical to cloud success. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nhas been key to Rackspace\u2019s success? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primarily, the key is our culture. We have identified that\nany efforts to build a culture of trust between business and customer will be\nmeaningless if the same principles of trust and transparency are not reflected\nwithin the businesses\u2019 own ethos and working culture. By creating a\ncustomer-centric in-house culture, we can offer a fanatical experience to our\ncustomers across the business, no matter what the touchpoint or service. An\nexample of this is one of our customer services team members was helping a\ncustomer and when in conversation, they heard that the customer was going to be\nin the office for a while and would miss dinner at home. The Racker bought the\ncustomer a pizza and had it delivered to their desk. This is just one example\nof how we thrive to provide not just fanatical support, but a wholly fanatical\nexperience for our customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second factor\nis our evolution. We have gone from a competitor to a trusted partner of the\nglobal public cloud players, like GCP, AWS and Azure. Unlike most service\nproviders \u2013 and certainly the big cloud players \u2013 we take a wholly unbiased\napproach to cloud migration, so our customers know that we are advising them to\ntake the cloud platform that will achieve the best outcome for each project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company recently underwent a strategy and brand shift towards becoming a technology services company. How does this new strategy reflect changing customer demands? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our recent rebrand has really been a shift to thematically\nunderpin what we\u2019ve known for a long-time. It is the secret of our success: we\nput the customer first. We wanted to bring to the fore our philosophy that\nplaces both customers and trust at the core of our business. We want our\ncustomers to understand and celebrate that no matter who they engage with at\nRackspace \u2013 whether that\u2019s a technical specialist, customer service agent or\nthe billing team \u2013 they will have a fanatical experience centred around\nenabling their success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also reflects the massively diversified services that our\ncustomers are now demanding from us as they look for guidance in areas that\nRackspace isn\u2019t historically known for, such as our Rackspace Application\nServices (RAS) that have been built out through the two recent acquisitions of\nRelation Edge and TriCore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, IT environments are getting harder and there is\nno way for CIOs and IT Directors to be experts in every new enterprise\ntechnology and understand how it can be best applied to their business. Our\ncustomers continually look to us \u2013 and challenge us \u2013 to support them in\nclosing the gap between the complex reality that is their IT environment today\nand what can be achieved tomorrow through new technologies and practices. Part\nof our rebrand is celebrating the ability of the Rackspace professional\nservices team in supporting our customers throughout their Digital Transformation\njourney, whether that\u2019s cloud migration, introducing DevOps practices or\napplication management. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it\u2019s not all change. As\npart of the rebrand, we have retained and refocused on what we know is most\nimportant for our customers \u2013 accelerating the value of the cloud. Cloud\nmigration remains a \u2018critical\u2019 or \u2018high priority\u2019 business initiative for most\nbusiness leaders, but the challenges of predicting costs, execution complexity\nand delivering on the vision remains a challenge. Where our strategy hasn\u2019t\nshifted with the rebrand is our dedication to ensuring that we support our\ncustomers throughout their cloud journey and help them continually optimise\ntheir estates to ensure that they continue to drive value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\nare the biggest challenges and opportunities your customers are currently\nfacing? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rackspace works\nwith businesses across their entire Digital Transformation process \u2013 of which\nthe goals and outcomes can differ significantly between industries \u2013 so it\u2019s\nhard to point to a few key challenges or opportunities that our customers are\nfacing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 particularly around peak periods. To support the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas for Trading\nPoint, a large and well-established international investment online brokerage\nfirm, the internal IT team needed to focus on driving value back to the\nbusiness\u2019 core competencies, so the company started looking for a strategic\npartner to take on the management of hardware infrastructure and support the\nfirm in\nthe maintenance of its systems. High reliability and low latency are key to\nensuring that Trading Point is able to continuously deliver its superior\nservice to its customers. So, for Rackspace, the challenge lay in ensuring that\nthe IT infrastructure was scalable, optimised and secure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rackspace recently announced a significant expansion of\nits operations in Europe. How do these European markets differ and why did\nRackspace choose to expand in these areas? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, we\nannounced that Rackspace would be embarking on its most ambitious EMEA\nexpansion plan to date, investing heavily in growing its footprint in Germany\nand Northern Europe \u2013 something that I am personally very excited about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reason for this\nexpansion is that we\u2019ve seen massive demand from German\ncompanies for local expertise, as well as having the breadth, depth and\nscale to support them at every stage in their cloud journey. Traditionally in\nGermany, many firms have been slower to start out on their cloud journey and\nwith their high focus on data security and privacy, having that local support\nand expertise has been an important factor to reassure them that they\u2019ll still\nbe able to provide the same level of service and data protection to their\ncustomers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Netherlands,\nhowever, the market is a little more mature, with many companies having already\nembarked on their cloud journey. With our customers in this area, we saw\nheightened demand to support them as they take their next steps on their cloud\nadoption journey and in helping them understand how they can use it to improve\nsales and drive greater revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\ntrends are impacting CIOs the most and how is Rackspace supporting customers? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the biggest challenges CIOs\nface is ensuring they\u2019re able to deliver value from their cloud and Digital Transformation\nprojects at cost. A recent global survey of business and IT leaders\nfound that several years into their migration, 40% of businesses said their\ncloud migration costs were still higher than expected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019re 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 car journey, in the cloud this could be providing additional expertise to support you in a specific project \u2013 whether that\u2019s a \u2018Cost Governance as a Service\u2019 or \u2018Solution Architect as-a-Service\u2019 to build complex cloud architectures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lowering the barrier to consume these new services will enable our customers to 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\u2019s in their operations, resource requirements or service engagements \u2013 and that its ultimately critical for their success in the cloud. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Business transformation is crucial to survival in modern industry as new technologies revolutionise the way we operate. Lee James, CTO EMEA at Rackspace, discusses how the company is helping its customers accelerate their value to the cloud and ensure they have the right support in place for their transformation journey \u2013 critical to cloud success. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":40448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,6787,6,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud","category-digital-transformation","category-insights","category-top-stories"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40028"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40447,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40028\/revisions\/40447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}