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Rackspace Technology and Humen.Ai Collaborate to Streamline Artificial Intelligence-Powered Dance App

December 15, 2020

Rackspace Technology and Humen.Ai Collaborate to Streamline Artificial Intelligence-Powered Dance App

Rackspace Technology and Humen.Ai Collaborate to Streamline Artificial Intelligence-Powered Dance App

Human.Ai Expected to Save 70% on Infrastructure Costs 

SAN ANTONIO – December 15, 2020 – Rackspace Technology™ (NASDAQ: RXT), a leading end-to-end multicloud technology solutions company, today announced it has worked with Humen.Ai, an Machine Learning (ML)-core company that uses deep learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create personalized interactive content, to rebuild Humen.Ai’s Sway: Magic Dance iOS application, using serverless and machine learning technologies to realize significant cost and functionality improvements.

Humen.Ai partnered with Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner, Onica, a Rackspace Technology company, to improve its Sway app, which uses AI-powered motion filters to let users visualize themselves conducting complex dance moves. Rackspace Technology’s team of engineers quickly identified the need for a stronger infrastructure foundation for rapid releases and reduced infrastructure cost.

In just six weeks, Rackspace Technology replaced Humen.Ai’s hand-built environment with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with Spot Instances, reducing infrastructure costs by up to 70%. The new application enables AI and production teams to get app enhancements into users’ hands faster through lightweight, containerized infrastructure.

“One of our top priorities on this project was cost savings. By consolidating the 400 existing AWS instances to Amazon ECS with Spot Instances, Humen.Ai’s infrastructure is now easier to manage and operate,” said Tolga Tarhan, CTO of Rackspace Technology. “We developed a lightweight AI  infrastructure that now allows Humen.Ai to manage all of the application’s features using only serverless technologies. The newfound agility of this solution will take a huge burden off of the Humen.Ai engineering team, allowing them to focus their time on creating innovative new products.”

Prior to collaborating with Rackspace Technology’s engineering team, the Sway: Magic Dance iOS application relied on 400 AWS G4 on-demand instances controlled by a complex system that was built internally and drove up cost of operation. Rackspace Technology took the application’s ability to quickly train models and delivered a custom solution built on AWS. The solution was devised to schedule Amazon ECS containers so that the application could complete more AI tasks at the same time. The end results were showcased during the app’s 2020 Superbowl launch in partnership with Doritos.

“Working with Rackspace Technology’s engineers really helped us scale our infrastructure to support our small team during our early stages of growth,” said Tinghui Zhou, Co-founder and CEO of Humen.Ai. “We’ve doubled, maybe even tripled, our throughput of processing demands from our users. By working with Rackspace, we have unlocked time and cost savings allowing us to prepare for future expansions of our offerings to sports, TV, gaming and movies. With significantly reduced cost savings, we can now redirect funds to new ventures, like providing ways for users to collaborate and share content within the app and improving the app’s photorealism output with 3D-based perception for its skeleton and scene-analysis ML models.”

In total, Rackspace Technology reimagined Humen.Ai’s iOS application by implementing Amazon ECS™, Amazon ECR™, Spot ASG™ (containers on Amazon ECS), AWS Step Functions™ and AWS Lambda™ (serverless) for a more optimized and efficient experience. 

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.

About Humen.Ai

Humen.Ai, an ML-core company, uses deep learning and AI to create personalized interactive content. Its flagship app, Sway, allows users to create videos of themselves performing motions captured from professional dancers, athletes, martial artists, and more and share with friends.

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.