Rackspace has announced the general availability of Fanatical Support(r) for Amazon Web Services(tm) (AWS) in all markets outside of the U.S., where it has been available since October 2015. Healthy snack provider Graze is one of the first companies in the UK to take advantage of the new offering after updating its IT infrastructure and selecting a managed cloud provider.
Fanatical Support for AWS provides tools, expertise, application management, and operational support to customers on the AWS Cloud. It was initially announced at the AWS Re:Invent event in October 2015. Since then, Rackspace has already trained or recruited an expert team of certified AWS engineers and architects acquiring more than 200 technical certifications.
Graze is a long-term AWS customer and signed up for Fanatical Support for AWS in January 2016. The British company was launched in 2009 by seven friends who wanted to offer busy people tastier, healthier snacks. The group went on to create an eCommerce business that delivers Graze boxes (packages containing a variety of healthy snacks), to a convenient location for the customer - often their workplace. The business has grown rapidly ever since and successfully expanded into the U.S. market in 2013.
The company's IT team decided to re-architect the solution so it could achieve a high level of scalability and resilience, while reducing the in-house resource required to run the infrastructure. Rackspace established reputation for providing first-class support and expertise was a primary consideration for Graze, who evaluated the capabilities of several managed service providers. Working with Rackspace, Graze is now able to focus the internal team's time on tasks that deliver value to the business and contribute towards its ambitions of using technology to become the world's number one healthy snack brand.
Tom Percival, CIO of Graze, said: "We needed to considerably reduce the amount of in-house man hours spent maintaining our IT infrastructure and by adopting Fanatical Support(r) for AWS we are looking forward to our IT team being able to focus on tasks that drive business value. We also expect to drive great developer efficiency due to the extensive roadmap of infrastructure improvements we'll be working on collaboratively."
James Cowe, Director of AWS Strategy & Architecture at Rackspace, said: "Fanatical Support for AWS is an attractive option for a successful and expanding business like Graze, which needs to focus its resources on delivering value to the company rather than managing increasingly complex layers of technology. Many of the CIOs we speak to are finding it tough to justify having to spend precious budget on growing the internal IT team to provide the amount of man power and skills needed to run technology effectively. That's where managed cloud services like Fanatical Support for AWS can really help firms to reduce the overall cost and time spent maintaining IT infrastructure."
