Rackspace Hosting Announces Enhanced Partner Program

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announced its enhanced Rackspace Partner Program, which combines its four channel programs into one global partner experience. The improved program provides partners with a broad range of additional hosted services, a centralized portal for relationship management, an integrated compensation structure and tiered benefits for various program levels.

By combining the company's previous four partner programs for managed hosting, cloud hosting, e-mail hosting and Rackspace Cloud Drive (JungleDisk), Rackspace is streamlining the overall partner experience, making it easier than ever for its over 4,500 partners to refer and resell additional services and increase their revenue opportunities. A key enhancement to the program is an upgraded benefits and compensation structure and single contract that enables partners to receive compensation for qualifying resales and referrals across the company's full suite of offerings, including:

• Dedicated Hosting
• Cloud Hosting (Cloud Servers and Cloud Files)
• E-mail Hosting (Rackspace E-mail & Hosted Microsoft Exchange, Hosted Microsoft SharePoint)
• Rackspace Cloud Drive (Jungle Disk)

The enhanced program also features four partner tiers – Platinum, Gold, Silver and Member – that include all product offerings and reward partners with points for business secured and referred or resold on a consistent scale.

"Rackspace's new unified partner program is perfect for a company like ours," said Kenan Rappuchi, vice president business development at Websitemovers.com, Inc., a leading data migration company. "Most of our customers are utilizing dedicated hosting, and many are now looking to incorporate cloud connected services to leverage the combined economic benefits of cloud with on-demand computing capabilities. With the enhanced Rackspace Partner Program it's even easier for us to extend these services to our customers and offer new services such as hosted email, hosted Microsoft® SharePoint® and online back-up capabilities. This definitely helps Websitemovers.com enhance our ‘trusted advisor' status with customers, build incremental revenue streams, and continue to help customers make their business run optimally."

The improved program also provides Rackspace channel partners with better service and support, as well as sales and marketing assistance to help take partners to the next level. Select partners will have a designated channel manager handling their contract, co-marketing activities and all other aspects of their relationship. An integrated Partner Relationship M (PRM) portal will also provide partners with a single view of their relationship, including opportunity and lead management, commissions reporting, and access to educational tools, training and sales resources.

Rackspace has also invested resources to continue driving advancements in the program, including marketing support with the development of micro sites to drive content directly to a partner's websites, co-branded collateral automation, and a virtual briefing center with Learning Management System (LMS) capabilities to improve education and training about Rackspace's deep product portfolio.

"The enhanced Rackspace Partner Program is all about empowering our channel partners for the cloud revolution," said Robert Fuller, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Rackspace. "We offer the industry's broadest portfolio of cloud computing and hosting solutions. As the market shifts from traditional on-premise server management to cloud-hosted services, we are empowering our channel partners to capitalize on this significant business opportunity and increase their 'trusted advisor' status with their customers."

For more information about the enhanced Rackspace Partner Program visit: www.rackspace.com/partners

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, and the founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and was featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the "2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting."