August 20, 2012
By Judith Aquino,

Rackspace Extends Critical Application Services to Adobe CQ

Open cloud company Rackspace announced today that it has rebranded its Critical Sites service to Critical Application Services and has extended its cloud service to Adobe CQ Web content management customers. Through Rackspace's support for cloud and hybrid solutions, digital marketers will be able to launch and scale campaigns quicker while monitoring the performance of their sites, according to Adobe.

"Rackspace customers have been asking us to start supporting applications, so this announcement is about the enhanced capabilities that we're putting into critical sites," explains Robert Fuller, vice president of global enterprise solutions at Rackspace. "The first application that we're providing enhanced services to is Adobe CQ, and by supporting the application layer [of Adobe's CQ Web content management system], this lets our partners and their customers focus on their businesses."

Rackspace's Critical Application Services features include Web scale engineering (custom implementation and optimization of the application and infrastructure environment); application performance management (the ability to monitor all end-user transactions of Web-based applications in real-time), and advanced static and synthetic URL monitoring.

Noting that cloud computing is a "growing trend," being able to combine Rackspace's cloud support capabilities with Adobe's Web content management platform is important to marketers, notes Loni Kao Stark, director of product, solution, and industry marketing at Adobe.

"Although our customers still use the on-premise option, they also want solutions that can be hosted in the cloud," Kao Stark says. "Having that extra level of support from Rackspace lets marketers set up campaigns on CQ quicker and build up microsites and Web sites faster."

Rackspace already serves several of Adobe's customers, such as Acquity Group, Razorfish, and SapientNitro, which use its CQ platform. Extending its Critical Application Services to Adobe CQ in the cloud will "expand the scope of support and deployment options we can offer our customers using the platform," noted Kevin Ellenwood, vice president of shared services at Acquity Group, in a statement. "It's a great offering for companies looking to implement and derive value on CQ very quickly."

Investments in cloud computing are expected to continue rising. Gartner predicts enterprise spending on public cloud services will grow from last year's $91 billion to $109 billion worldwide by the end of this year. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending is expected to reach $207 billion.