Rackspace Broadens Hybrid Cloud Ecommerce Vision Through Magento Partner Program

Rackspace Broadens Hybrid Cloud Ecommerce Vision Through Magento Partner Program

Leading Open Cloud and Ecommerce Providers Team Up to Provide High Performance Solutions for Online Retail Businesses

SAN ANTONIO, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Today, Rackspace® Hosting (NYS: RAX) , the open cloud company, announced it has entered into the Magento Hosting Partner program as a platinum level partner. Rackspace and Magento, a division of X.commerce, an eBay Inc. company, will work collaboratively to serve both dedicated and open hybrid cloud customers with one of the fastest growing ecommerce platforms on the market.

For companies aiming to expand their global footprint, the collaboration between Rackspace and Magento will provide a low cost entry into new markets around the world without the cost of establishing a physical presence. Through a broad product portfolio that includes dedicated hosting, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud, Rackspace is giving customers the flexibility to choose the right solution for their unique business needs.

Rackspace's hybrid cloud in particular provides a differentiated and compelling customer experience, as it offers a dedicated infrastructure for managing day-to-day traffic, along with powerful open cloud solutions for sporadic spikes during peak times such as Cyber Monday, Black Friday and free shipping Thursday. In addition, Rackspace helps online retailers achieve PCI compliance by delivering a variety of products for its dedicated and cloud customers.

"Within three months of launching the new site built on the Magento platform, Gant's online orders went up 340 percent. We also saw a 290 percent increase in conversion rates and 35 percent reduction in page load time," said Anna Carlqvist, a global eCommerce manager at GANT Clothing in UK. "Thanks to the infinite scalability of the Rackspace Open Cloud, Gant can scale servers up and down to meet customer needs while only paying for what we actually use. This has lead to a 50 percent reduction in hosting costs."

Rackspace is gaining traction within the ecommerce market; according to a study from ecommerce publishing authority Internet Retailer, Rackspace is currently ranked the number one hosting provider for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites. Rackspace now hosts a greater percentage of the world's Magento deployments than any other hosting provider.^[1]

"Over the past five years, Rackspace and Magento have developed a strong, lasting relationship with the shared goal of providing an optimal, end-to-end ecommerce solution," said Suaad Sait, chief marketing officer at Rackspace. "The ecommerce space is evolving and more online retailers are moving their back end infrastructure to the cloud. As demand increases and more businesses make the initial transition to the cloud, we look forward to ongoing collaboration with Magento to take advantage of this growing marketing opportunity."

With over 1,000 Magento deployments globally ranging from SMB to Fortune 500 customers, Rackspace has developed core competency and expertise in Magento implementations. Rackspace's go-to-market offering features specialized sales representatives and engineers that will help businesses architect, design and deploy highly scalable ecommerce sites, which are all backed by Fanatical Support®.

As part of its commitment to Magento and the Magento user community, Rackspace has also developed significant partnerships with several top solutions integrators in the market to ensure end-to-end integration with Rackspace's dedicated and open hybrid cloud solutions.

"We view Rackspace as a high-quality partner, which has a strong reputation for helping customers of all sizes successfully implement Magento solutions," said Ryan Thompson, head of business development and partnerships for Magento. "We are excited about Rackspace becoming a platinum level partner and through this expanded agreement, we will work together to make a deeper push into the enterprise market."

Rackspace will be a Diamond sponsor at the Magento Imagine Conference being held in Las Vegas on April 8-10. Mitch Robins, senior systems engineer at Rackspace, will deliver a speech on April 10 regarding global expansion. Rackspace will also be exhibiting at the conference in booth #9.

To learn more about how Rackspace and Magento are working together to deliver reliable, scalable and high performing ecommerce solutions, please visit: www.rackspace.com/magento.

About Rackspace

Rackspace® Hosting (NYS: RAX) is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 205,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support® across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, is featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For and is included on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the "2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting." Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with any ecommerce products or services or relationships with third parties such as Magento; anticipated operational and financial benefits from any ecommerce products or services or relationships with third parties such as Magento; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions including the possibility that expected benefits from ecommerce products or services or relationships with third parties such as Magento may not materialize because the products or services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the product or service cost effectively, differentiate the product from competitive products or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the product or service, (iii) failure of third parties to properly or adequately fulfill their obligations; (iv) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefits of the product or service, (v) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (vi) internal strategy decisions that impact the products and services, and (vii) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2012, filed with the SEC on March 1, 2013. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

^[1] Magento Usage Statistics - http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Magento

Rackspace Hosting
Brandon Brunson, 512-680-4385
brandon.brunson@rackspace.com

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