CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Rackspace Drives State-of-the-Art IT Hosting Services, Reduces IT Costs with BMC Software

HOUSTON, June 23, 2009 – Zero downtime, fanatical support, and meaningful cost savings are all part of the value proposition that IT hosting provider Rackspace promises to thousands of customers worldwide.

To deliver on that pledge, Rackspace built its infrastructure to deliver IT as a business service. Following a competitive evaluation, the company turned to BMC Software (NYSE: BMC) to support its strategic “Service Innovation” initiatives.

“Our relationship with BMC Software has been a phenomenal success,” said David Mills, director of service innovation at Rackspace. “As a direct result of BMC solutions, we can now handle three to four times more events each month with the same resources. We have enormous momentum, and senior management is pushing the team to deliver even higher levels of automation.”

BMC provides Rackspace with an integrated environment that helps operations personnel quickly identify and respond to events that might disrupt services to customers. As a result, the Rackspace IT organization has achieved a number of major objectives, including:

Completion of an event-to-service correlation project in only eight weeks, significantly reducing the number of help-desk tickets.
Recovery of nearly 200 hours of productivity by automating the processes for handling routine errors.
Creation of a workflow to automatically scan server patches, eliminating approximately 10,000 level-1 incidents while ensuring compliance with customer accreditation policies.

Historically, Rackspace operations personnel had to maneuver through a six-step process to respond to each event, many of which did not require intervention. To resolve this issue, BMC leveraged its longstanding alliance with Dell, offering a comprehensive solution architecture based on BMC Atrium solutions and Dell PowerEdge servers. Rackspace selected the joint solution, choosing BMC to integrate service management, problem management and service automation.

“Our growth during the past decade has been very strong, and we scaled our delivery capability by hiring more and more employees,” continued Mills. “But we recognized that while our people are highly motivated, that same desire to make a difference meant that they were becoming frustrated with repetitive, manual processes. Increasing the level of automation to eliminate tedious tasks and make support roles more interesting became an important business objective for Rackspace.”

Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software.

The most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC’s comprehensive approach and unified platform help IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended March 31, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.87 billion.

Public Relations Contacts:

David Tishgart
Phone: (512) 731-3315
david_tishgart@bmc.com

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