Rackspace Hires New Sales Leader To Drive Customer Acquisition

Todd Cione’s team to help customers find hybrid cloud mix that best fits needs

SAN ANTONIO - Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has hired IT industry heavyweight Todd Cione to lead the firm’s Americas Acquisition Sales division. Cione brings more than two decades of experience developing successful sales and support teams across broad geographies. He spent his last 15 years at Microsoft, most recently based in Singapore and responsible for $4 billion in annual revenue for software, cloud services and enterprise services.

At Rackspace, Cione’s mission is to accelerate market-share gains and acquisition of new customers in the Americas, via both direct and channel sales. Cione will take the lead in leveraging Rackspace’s unmatched value proposition.  Rackspace is a world leader in hybrid cloud, which offers customers the best fit for each of their workloads, whether on public cloud, private cloud or dedicated servers.  Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack, the open-source operating system, which enables hybrid cloud by allowing customers to move workloads seamlessly from one platform to another, free of vendor lock-in.  All Rackspace services are backed by its industry-leading customer service, known as Fanatical Support®.

“Every day we see evidence of customers choosing Rackspace’s open, hybrid cloud approach as the right architecture to enable the best fit for each application,” said Taylor Rhodes, Rackspace’s Senior VP. “The ability to choose the right mix of public cloud, private cloud and dedicated solutions, backed by our unbeatable Fanatical Support, dramatically increases business value for our customers. I believe that Todd’s breadth and depth of experience in our industry, matched with his demonstrated success in building winning sales teams, will accelerate our leadership in the hybrid cloud market.”

Cione said,  “Rackspace understands that hybrid architectures are the future of cloud computing and I believe the company’s vision will be the driving force behind innovation as this market evolves.  I look forward to joining the Rackspace family to help expand the reach of the hybrid cloud and the profound impact it’s having on the information technology sector as a whole.”

Cione is a graduate of Baylor University with a degree in English and business. 

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company and founder of OpenStack, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace delivers its renowned Fanatical Support® to more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents.  Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, which enable businesses to run their workloads where they run most effectively — whether on the public cloud, a private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.au.

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 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 anticipated operational and financial benefits from Rackspace strategies related to additions or changes in leadership, the success of leadership transition, company growth or success of new operational initiatives, any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the integration and effectiveness of new leadership into the Rackspace culture and business operations, instability or downturns in the economy, the effectiveness of managing company growth, infrastructure failures and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2013, filed with the SEC on May 9, 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.