Cloud Servers attract waves of agile new customers to UK Cloud Offering

LONDON, 10 May, 2011 - Rackspace, the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, today announces that its UK operation has signed over 3,000 cloud customers including system tracking experts Phantom and content management specialists Juicy Media, in just three months since its UK cloud launch in January.

To help Rackspace understand more about their cloud customers, they initiated a survey of the new UK cloud customers. The survey indicated that key sectors were utilizing cloud computing, including web development / design (which 33% of the new customers identified as their primary industry), IT services (20%), SaaS (11%), e-commerce (7%) and news / media (5%).

While smaller businesses make up the majority of the new cloud computing customers,12% of those signed since the official UK cloud launch are enterprises defined as organizations that have revenue in excess of £30 million annually, indicating that there may be an increase in confidence amongst larger organisations to utilize cloud computing.

"Cloud computing adoption amongst UK businesses has begun to accelerate with some serious momentum," said David Kelly, SVP of International at Rackspace. “Cloud is one of the most favourable IT solutions on the market today, as businesses are now able to quickly and cheaply access data and processing power remotely in the quantity they need, when they need it. Our cloud servers can be spun into service extremely quickly, so the supply really can meet demand needed by companies seeking an agile IT backbone.”

Peter Davies, Technical Director of Juicy Media comments: “When we first set up the business we were hosting everything in-house and with that came the usual responsibilities of maintenance, tech support and the inevitable equipment costs.

“We soon realised that it was important to make changes to accommodate business growth. We either had to expand our own data centre or outsource the hosting and management tasks. There were several options available to us in the market, but the launch of cloud services in the UK by Rackspace® Hosting could not have been more timely or appropriate to our needs.”

According to the customer survey, over half (51%) of Rackspace UK’s cloud customers are using cloud servers to test and develop web environments, while others are using cloud servers for other purposes such as to host corporate websites (37%) and share a hosted platform (20%). In addition, half (50%) of Rackspace UKs cloud customers are using cloud files for archives, libraries and backups.