A recent Gartner study suggests that 61 percent of enterprise IT and business-oriented consumers of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) technology feel that this type of technology is important or critically important to their business.[2] However, the growing complexity associated with managing cloud-based applications presents a significant challenge, as many businesses lack the in-house expertise needed to effectively architect, monitor and optimise these applications.
“Unplanned downtime for mission and non-mission critical applications are costing companies more than $11 million per year on average,” said Brannon Lacey, vice president and general manager of applications and platforms at Rackspace. “This represents a massive hit to their bottom line and it’s disruptive to their business. With our Application Operations offering, we’re helping to solve this challenge and will help enable our customers to focus more on innovation and advancing their business priorities by leaving the application management and support to our experienced experts.”
Rackspace Application Services (RAS), formerly known as Managed Application Services, is a suite of offerings designed for customers who need advanced expertise and support options at the application level for their most business-critical applications. The new RAS Application Operations offering will help CIOs, application architects and application managers build, optimise and manage their applications and environments to ensure operational excellence and differentiated customer experiences 24x7x365.
RAS Application Operations provides businesses with a range of management and support services including:
- Application and System Architecture Optimisation - Provides consultation on architecting the application and the underlying infrastructure, as well as optimising application configurations to achieve high performance and to meet the demands of the business.
- Application Performance Analysis – Provides actionable insights into the performance of business-critical applications through proactive monitoring, alerting and troubleshooting.
- Application Support and Consultation Services – Delivers deep expertise and 24x7x365 support across a variety of platforms and languages, while providing guidance around application optimisation and management best practices.
- Production Platform Uptime Guarantee – Offers industry leading service level agreement with 100 percent production platform uptime guarantee.
“The number of assets we’re developing is growing exponentially,” said Jared Ray, digital marketing manager at Micron CPG, the channel- and consumer-facing business of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world. “We chose Rackspace to deploy and manage our AEM implementation and the range of applications we use to store, share and publish our content. While they’re only responsible for the application level, Rackspace asked us to make them aware of any customisations we made to the application. I think their willingness to keep an eye on what we’ve done, even though they’re not responsible for it, speaks volumes to their commitment and support.”
