Rackspace Acquires SharePoint911

Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing, on Thursday announced its acquisition of SharePoint911, an industry leader in SharePoint consulting, training, and "JumpStart" services within SharePoint. The unification of both companies provides capabilities to deliver unequalled SharePoint hosting solutions along with expert services to the enterprise market.

John Engates, chief innovation officer at Rackspace, noted that they are "thrilled to have the world-class expertise of SharePoint911 on our team to give us greater application delivery service capabilities. SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers during increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure."

Founded in 2004, SharePoint911 is widely recognized in the SharePoint community for their technical excellence and thought leadership. The SharePoint911 team includes six Microsoft MVPs, and the authors of over ten SharePoint books just as Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration, Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint and Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design as so then as nine SharePoint training courses.

"Rackspace's acquisition of SharePoint911, a company dedicated to end-user SharePoint adoption, is a key strategic development, given that one of the primary barriers to broader SharePoint usage in businesses is the lack of comprehensive design, development, training, and end user support services to drive innovative SharePoint implementations," said Melanie Posey, innovation vice president, hosting & managed network services at IDC. "We believe that Rackspace has uniquely positioned itself above its competitors by adding the thought leadership and expertise of SharePoint911. Going forward, Rackspace can help to furthermore accelerate adoption of SharePoint, one of the fastest growing applications in the business productivity segment."

Assistant news editor at SYS-CON Events

Elizabeth is an assistant news editor at SYS-CON Events, Inc. where annual high-energy conferences are created with industry-leading players. Elizabeth works on the SYS-CON Events team behind Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Virtualization Conference & Expo, GovIT Expo, and the UlitzerLive! New-Media Conference & Expo.