Rackspace, Persistent Systems Partner for 'Total Stack' SaaS Offerings

Persistent Systems, a vendor of Outsourced Product Development services, and Rackspace Hosting, a vendor of hosted IT services, have entered into a partner agreement where both companies make available each other’s product, “ultimately creating a total product stack for customers — from managed infrastructure to software development and enablement for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)), Web applications, data migration and application support,” Persistent officials said

 

Through this relationship, Rackspace officials said, the company can recommend Persistent’s full array of software development services to customers, who can use them over the life of their applications and products. This product partner agreement comes on the heels of a successful outsourcing product development relationship between Rackspace and Persistent.

 

“Rackspace had never worked with an offshore vendor before,” said Tony Campbell, director of the software development division at Rackspace Hosting, in a statement. “We engaged Persistent in order to see how the model would work.”

 

Rackspace officials said they use Persistent’s expertise on a variety of projects, and avail themselves of “the knowledge of Persistent’s people… its data warehouse and Java competency centers.”

 

Last year a customer survey conducted by Rackspace found that nearly 36 percent of responding SaaS customers do not know the uptime guarantees provided in the SaaS vendor Service Level Agreement although, the survey found, "security, application uptime and network connectivity are among their top technical concerns."

 

The survey also concluded that 49 percent of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) customers do not know where the infrastructure behind their SaaS application lies, whether it is hosted internally with the SaaS provider or through a third-party hosting provider.

 

John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace Managed Hosting, said at the time "SaaS providers need to clearly communicate their hosting and infrastructure details in the Service Level Agreement, drilling down to security promises, uptime guarantees, network connectivity, data backup processes and more. This way, customers are aware of their SaaS provider's service obligations, and they can rest assured their mission-critical applications such as e-mail or Customer Relationship Management software will perform as promised."