Fanatical Support for Office 365 Now Available

Rackspace, a managed cloud company, today announced that it will offer Fanatical Support and premium managed services for Microsoft Office 365, a leading cloud business productivity solution. With two new offerings, Fanatical Support for Office 365 and Rackspace Managed Services for Office 365, customers can purchase multiple Office 365 services from Rackspace including migration assistance and tier-one support, as well as premium managed services for Office 365 licenses not originally purchased from Rackspace.

Rackspace support for Office 365 is the newest addition to the Cloud Office at Rackspace portfolio, which offers customers the flexibility to choose from a broad set of fully-managed business productivity tools delivered on a variety of technology platforms to help meet customers’ communication and collaboration needs. Rackspace will resell and support six Office 365 plans with management services for SMB and mid-market customers including deployment and migration assistance, tier-one troubleshooting and prioritized Microsoft support escalations. Additionally, Rackspace will offer managed services for Office 365, including a dedicated support team, on Office 365 licenses purchased through Rackspace or directly from Microsoft for mid-market and enterprise customers.

Rackspace has supported Microsoft Exchange for more than eight years. This new announcement extends the relationship with Microsoft to support customers across the Office 365 suite who are looking for an increased level of support. According to Gartner, “as of 2Q14, only 10% of users (67 million) in the overall enterprise office market have moved to cloud office systems and most have focused on email, not the broad range of capabilities.” However, “after slow growth from 2007 to 2013, cloud office system adoption is accelerating. It will reach 25% of the market's total potential by the end of 2017, 50% by 2020 and 90% by the market's 20th birthday in 2027.

Rackspace support for Office 365 will include two solution offerings: 

• Fanatical Support for Office 365 – Rackspace will sell and offer tier-one support for six Office 365 business and enterprise plans including Office 365 Business Essentials, Business, Business Premium, ProPlus, Enterprise E1 and Enterprise E3. Customers will receive free Microsoft Exchange migrations and Fanatical Support from a team of Cloud Office specialists.

• Rackspace Managed Services for Office 365 – Rackspace will offer a premium level of support and advisory services for mid-market and enterprise-level customers on top of Office 365 plans through either Rackspace or Microsoft. This level of managed support includes Exchange migrations, onboarding and deployment assistance and tier-one troubleshooting, plus Advisory Services from a dedicated account team to help configure Office 365 to best fit customers’ unique business IT needs.

 “Microsoft Office 365 is one of the world’s most popular email and productivity solutions in the cloud, with a run rate of over $2.5 billion in 2014,” said Aziz Benmalek, vice president, Hosting Service Provider business at Microsoft. “As a leading managed cloud company, Rackspace is well positioned to offer premium support for Office 365 so customers have more variety when deciding on the support level that best suits their business needs. We are pleased to see Rackspace continue to expand our longstanding collaboration following them joining the Microsoft Cloud OS Network in November and now adopting Office 365 into their Cloud Office suite.”