Rackspace plans direct presence in NZ

Rackspace is planning to hire in New Zealand in the next few months to support its activity in the country.

Speaking to Reseller News Angus Dorney, director and GM for Rackspace in A/NZ, says, “We plan to have our first Racker – that’s what we call ourselves – in the country in the next few months. Growth in the country has been strong, and NZ is of importance to us. We will look to hire more people in the country based on demands and growth. On the back of some strong customer relationships we definitely want to grow our presence in NZ."

The Rackspace full-time employee will be based in Wellington and will focus on pre-sales activity and post-sales support.

According to Dorney, Rackspace gets a lot of interest in its offerings from small businesses and developers in the country, especially in initiatives such as its Startup program. With the launch of new managed service levels, including the developer+ programme, the company expects more interest in its solutions.

“We have thousands of New Zealand organisations that are using our solutions. Among them there are a fair number of developers. I couldn’t give you specific numbers. We do expect our developer community to grow with the launch of the developer+ programme,” says Dorney.

Rackspace’s new developer+ programme provides an infrastructure credit for a package of cloud services for a limited time. It is designed for developers who want to stay fast and lean and focus their engineering talent on building their app.

The infrastructure credit will cover a performance cloud server, a cloud load balancer, cloud monitoring, cloud networks, cloud backups, cloud files, cloud DNS and built-in email-as-a-service.

Developers will have access to public forums, IRC support, online documentation, direct access to Rackspace developers, alongside a fully redesigned developer portal.

“Developers are eligible to participate in this programme for up to 12 months before transitioning to either the managed infrastructure or managed operations service levels,” says Dorney.

Both managed infrastructure and managed operations service levels have been launched anew by the firm to offer more expertise at lower total cost. Managed Infrastructure offers a service level rate of $0.005/GB RAM per hour, with a $50 per month minimum. Managed Operations offers a service level rate of $0.02/GB RAM per hour, with a $500 per month minimum.

The developer+ programme will be available to customers in late July.