Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 47 | Page 45

flexibility, the ability to scale up and down and customise offerings – whether that’s in their operations, resource requirements or service engagements – and that its ultimately critical for their success in the cloud. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities your customers are currently facing? Rackspace works with businesses across their entire Digital Transformation process – of which the goals and outcomes can differ significantly between industries – so it’s hard to point to a few key challenges or opportunities that our customers are facing. However, to draw on a couple of examples, we have some customers whose business is doing so phenomenally well that they need support in ensuring their IT infrastructure is able to support it. For Trading Point, a large and well- established international investment online brokerage firm, the internal IT team needed to focus on driving value back to the business’ core competencies, so the company started looking for a strategic partner to take on the management of www.intelligentcio.com hardware infrastructure and support the firm in the maintenance of its systems. High reliability and low latency are key to ensuring that Trading Point is able to continuously deliver its superior service to its customers. So, for Rackspace, the challenge lay in ensuring that the IT infrastructure was scalable, optimised and secure. What has been key to Rackspace’s success? Primarily, the key is our culture. We have identified that any efforts to build a culture of trust between business and customer will be meaningless if the same principles of trust and transparency are not reflected within the businesses’ own ethos and working culture. By creating a customer-centric in-house culture, we can offer a fanatical experience to our customers across the business, no matter what the touchpoint or service. An example of this is one of our customer services team members was helping a customer and when in conversation, they heard that the customer was going to be in the office for a while and would miss dinner “ ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES CIOS FACE IS ENSURING THEY’RE ABLE TO DELIVER VALUE FROM THEIR CLOUD. at home. The Racker bought the customer a pizza and had it delivered to their desk. This is just one example of how we thrive to provide not just fanatical support, but a wholly fanatical experience for our customers. The second factor is our evolution. We have gone from a competitor to a trusted partner of the global public cloud players, like GCP, AWS and Azure. Unlike most service providers – and certainly the big INTELLIGENTCIO 45 45