Rackspace Extends Critical Application Services to the Open Cloud

📅 August 21, 2012 - New application-layer support is extended to Adobe CQ and, combined with Fanatical Support, allows customers to focus on their core business.

Rackspace Hosting, a hosting and cloud computing provider, yesterday announced extending Critical Application Services to the open cloud and support for Adobe CQ web content management customers.

The company articulates that Critical Application Services allows companies to focus on their core business while the company keeps their vital apps running smoothly. To provide this service level, it uses a unique combination of web-scale engineers, on-going consultation, and performance monitoring through a CA Technologies application performance management solution. Every environment is tailored to the customer's specific business needs. Critical Application Services (Advanced) is backed by Fanatical Support, and by the company's 100 percent Production Platform Uptime Guarantee.

According to it, as business-critical applications and customer websites become increasingly complex and highly distributed across public, private and hybrid environments, Critical Application Services provides a holistic view across the end user's application and infrastructure environment. This allows customers to proactively analyze and optimize performance and improve the user experience.

The company mentions that its Critical Application Services Features include:

• Web Scale Engineering (WSE) - Custom implementation and ongoing optimization of the application and infrastructure environment
• Application Performance Management (APM) - Monitors all end-user transactions of web-based applications with real-time visibility to any issues affecting application performance
• Advanced Infrastructure Monitoring (AIM) - Centralized, real-time visibility into infrastructure performance
• Advanced Static and Synthetic URL Monitoring
  

It states that Critical Application Services also enables organizations to maximize the effectiveness of Adobe CQ, the foundation of Adobe's Web Experience Management (WEM) solution. Adobe WEM provides digital marketers with easy-to-use, web-based applications for creating, managing, measuring and optimizing personalized online experiences across web, mobile and social channels. Support features include:

• Setup of Adobe CQ optimized development, testing, staging, pre-production and production-ready environments for both perpetual- and cloud-based licenses
• Installation and configuration of Author, Publisher and Dispatcher services and Web application servers
• Managing patches, upgrades and infrastructure expansions
  

"After listening to our customers describe their IT needs, we have extended Critical Application Services to the open cloud and support for Adobe CQ which raises the level of maintenance to the application layer," said Robert Fuller, VP of Global Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace. "By hiring us to provide support at the application layer, a customer can leverage Rackspace expertise to efficiently monitor and optimize infrastructure performance. This allows our partners and customers to focus on their core businesses."

"Rackspace clearly understands the application, hosting and high-availability requirements of our customers," said Kevin Cochrane, VP of Product Strategy and Solution Marketing, Adobe Systems Incorporated. "By extending Critical Application Services to Adobe CQ in the cloud, Rackspace is delivering our industry leading web experience management solution to digital marketers in a means that enables them to go live with campaigns immediately, scale as needed, and maintain complete visibility and confidence from implementation through production."