Rackspace and the `cuddle-factor’ of people

There are already signs that businesses offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are now facing what will become an increasingly stark choice – either compete on price alone (where the prices charge inevitably tend towards zero) or face an at least on-going, and probably ever-increasing, investment of some kind to keep providing a richer service that keeps their business sticky to their customers.

Many of the IaaS providers opting to follow the second route are following the model of adding more tools and services that enhance the capabilities of the service provided to meet the needs of user businesses. Providing this is certainly an important capability, particularly as customers become more experienced in using cloud services and start to demand more from their service providers.

Rackspace, however, is ploughing a different furrow to achieve the same basic goal of providing the resources that end user businesses need to meet their business objectives. That furrow consists of people.

According to Nigel Beighton, the company’s Technology VP, the target is provide skilled people who can work with Heat, a new part of OpenStack designed to orchestrate multiple composite cloud applications. It is due to formally appear in the next release of OpenStack, codenamed Grizzly, which is scheduled for release towards the end of this year.

Heat offers some interesting potential for cloud service users and developers. Not only does it allow them to develop service templates to run on a growing number of OpenStack hosting services, it also allows applications and services that have been developed to run on Amazon’s AWS CloudFormation template format to be moved to an OpenStack environment by integrating with the OpenStack APIs.

Working with templates has the potential to make the implementation of new services much faster, but it is in the natural order of the world that even the clearest template can still be difficult to understand for those with little or no experience of the underlying processes. This is why Rackspace is concentrating resources on building a comprehensive team of customer advisors to help users through the template process.

“We are keen to work with Heat,” Beighton said. “It will allow us to build up a suite of blueprints for applications types. They will be the soup-to-nuts basis of them, right up to the final writing of the business code that the customer needs. The aim is to make the process as much as possible something they no longer need to worry about.”

This is where the people come in. Business users will understand the business logic they need to work with, but are far less likely to understand how to translate that into a working service.

“There is a real need in the market from users who want to talk, indeed need to talk to people to achieve what they need,” Beighton said. “So we have to do it well; we cannot skimp on it.”

That requirement does provide the company with some obvious issues, which Beighton readily acknowledges. Not least is finding the right staff, which means that core education is an important start point – and one he acknowledges is not fully up to the mark, yet.

“ Education is only just starting to catch up when it comes to areas like the cloud,” he said. “Some establishments are getting there, but they are still few and far between. This is why Rackspace put the entire company staff – all 4,000 of us – through our own Cloud-U.”

This is the company’s own `university-alike’ education process, and it does have one important advantage. Because it is a one-subject education process, different staff can be educated to different, appropriate levels. “Even those working on our reception desks and phone switchboards need to have a basic understanding of the technology and processes so that they can direct callers to the right people.”

He does not see this growing to become a direct rival to the capabilities of the major consultancy houses, such as Accenture or KPMG, but he is serious that it grows into, and is accepted as, an important advisory service for the majority of business users. This is particularly the case as the cloud is significantly changing the relationship between IT service providers and their customers.

“In the past it was quite common for that relationship to be based around a five year service contract, but having a five year contract can make a service provider lazy. They don’t have to try too hard until the last year,” he said. “But that is changing. We are now moving to consumer model and the users must be allowed to change quickly to exploit it.

“The consumer `unit’ for service provision is no longer measured in years. Indeed it is now coming down to just a single hour. And we have to accept that users will now move their workloads for lots of reasons. With OpenStack, of course, they can do that easily, so we now have to be really bloody good at what we do for them.”   

With this approach Rackspace is less directed towards building up a technology stack of approved components, applications and services from which users can cherry-pick the elements they need to construct the business capabilities they require. Beighton doesn’t see this as a necessary approach because of its growing commitment to OpenStack. Its lack of specified hypervisor or database means the range of options available to customers is much wider and more flexible.

The advantages of that, however, can easily be countered by offering technologically inexperienced users too much choice – that is what the company is now concentrating on building the advisory capabilities.

“Our objective is to work at the API level, so that resources and applications platforms can be kept separate,” he said. “Then we can advise users on what is the best approach for their particular requirement.”