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Rackspace Technology Announces Results of Global Cloud Budget Survey, Uncovers the Hidden Complexities of IT Spend Management

August 19, 2020

Rackspace Technology Announces Results of Global Cloud Budget Survey, Uncovers the Hidden Complexities of IT Spend Management

Rackspace Technology Announces Results of Global Cloud Budget Survey, Uncovers the Hidden Complexities of IT Spend Management

78% of decision-makers report new concerns around budget or cost in the last three months

SAN ANTONIO – August 19, 2020 – Rackspace Technology™ (NASDAQ: RXT) today announced the release of a new survey, “Technology Budgets: Managing Shifting Priorities.”

The survey examines the proliferation of IT budget management across organizations. The results of the survey indicate that IT budgets are spread across many groups within organizations, making it increasingly difficult for IT decision-makers to maintain visibility into where and how their IT budgets are being spent.

The findings indicate that many organizations are not properly governing and optimizing costs. The survey finds that 50% of IT decision-makers lack a basic understanding of what cloud cost governance and cloud cost optimization are, and how they are different. Businesses in this category are at risk of cloud sprawl.

Across the board, leaders recognize the value in investing, tracking, and managing IT spend but finding someone with the expertise to do this effectively is a challenge. 99% of IT decision-makers surveyed reported having a documented IT budget and dedicated resources to manage IT spend, and yet almost half of those surveyed do not feel these resources are skilled enough to be effective.  

Cost management in turbulent times: The COVID-19 effect

Additionally, COVID-19 has taken an already difficult task and increased the complexity significantly, with respondents reporting the need to address a wide array of new technology challenges. 78% of decision-makers report new concerns around budget or cost in the last three months, with 43% reporting concern over being unable to fund planned projects.

Also, businesses report a 59% increase in spend on technologies to support remote working (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), productivity, video conferencing/collaboration, etc.), which required shifting budget away from planned initiatives and toward obtaining the technology necessary to keep the business running. As different business units seek to quickly adopt tools to maintain business continuity, the investment in other IT priorities can get lost in the shuffle and go untraced.

“Many businesses have found out the hard way in 2020 that their IT systems, resources and spend tracking weren’t ready for COVID,” said Jeff DeVerter, Chief Technology Officer – Solutions at Rackspace Technology. “With a 59% increase spend on IT tools, businesses have been forced to adapt quickly to a changing environment which is why we designed the Cloud Optimization solution, to provide customers with an end-to-end solution to help them optimize their cloud workloads for cost and performance.”

Through the new Cloud Optimization Solution, Rackspace Technology provides expertise and guidance to help customers address cost and performance optimization at each step of their cloud journey, which enables them to save money, improve performance, and gain a team of highly specialized experts to focus on their cloud optimization initiatives. Rackspace Technology’s certified cloud experts take a collaborative and flexible approach with each engagement, with the flexibility to adapt quickly to overcome any new challenges and ensure the success of each project.

“By choosing Rackspace Technology, clients will gain access to an industry-leading team of multicloud experts that they can rely on for unbiased guidance,” said Matt Stoyka, Chief Solutions Officer at Rackspace Technology. “A team of experts is available 24x7x365 to help them optimize their cloud workloads for cost and performance so that they can focus on what’s important – their business.”

“By working with Rackspace Technology to modernize and optimize our legacy IT landscape, we were able to realize 45% cost savings and improve performance by 40% across the board,” said Scott Strickland, EVP and CIO, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. “Rackspace helped us get out of the data center business and design and adopt a multicloud environment customized to meet our performance and cost savings goals. In working with Rackspace, we realized these guys and gals really know what they’re talking about. It’s not just something they put on the tin here. They’ve actually EXECuted this before.”

To download the whitepaper, click here.

About Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end multicloud technology services company. We can design, build and operate our customers’ cloud environments across all major technology platforms, irrespective of technology stack or deployment model. We partner with our customers at every stage of their cloud journey, enabling them to modernize applications, build new products and adopt innovative technologies.

Research methodology

The research was conducted by Censuswide, with a sample of 1516 Directors in the IT department in the UK, US, Australia, Colombia, Mexico, Germany, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore and Middle East (CSOs, CIOs, CTOs, etc.) in the following sectors: Public sector/ Government, Healthcare, Media, Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Retail. Censuswide abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society which is based on the ESOMAR principles.

About Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology® (NASDAQ: RXT) is the operator of the full enterprise AI stack from governed private cloud to AI inference and agents in production. With an Outcomes-as-a-Service model built on secure infrastructure, data foundations, and forward-deployed engineering, Rackspace delivers business results for regulated and mission-critical industries where governance, sovereignty, and uptime are non-negotiable. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events and can be identified by terminology such as “believe,” “may,” “will,” “potentially,” “estimate,” “continues,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “could,” “would,” “project,” “plan,” “expect,” “is putting,” “designed to,” or the negative of such terms or other similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words.

 These statements include, but are not limited to, Rackspace Technology’s relationship with NVIDIA and the NVIDIA Cloud Partner Program, its Enterprise AI Cloud strategy, the anticipated capabilities, benefits and timing of its Institutional Sovereign Pod architecture, Rackspace’s outlook on the AI industry and its ability to deliver, operate, and scale AI infrastructure and solutions for regulated, institutional and sovereign enterprises. Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including, without limitation: Rackspace's ability to realize the anticipated benefits of its relationship with NVIDIA and the NCP program; the availability, cost, and timing of deployment of NVIDIA and other third-party technology; Rackspace's ability to develop, market, and scale the Institutional Sovereign Pod and related offerings on the anticipated timeline or at all; market acceptance of and demand for sovereign and governed AI infrastructure solutions; competition in the AI infrastructure and cloud services markets; capital expenditure requirements associated with AI infrastructure buildout; availability of financing for the AI infrastructure buildout on terms acceptable to Rackspace; Rackspace’s reliance on a limited number of technology partners, including NVIDIA; cybersecurity, data privacy, and regulatory compliance risks associated with serving regulated and sovereign customers; general economic and industry conditions; and other risks and uncertainties described in Rackspace's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Rackspace undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.