Rackspace Buys Onica to Bolster Its AWS Managed Cloud Portfolio

Managed cloud service and colocation provider Rackspace Hosting announced this week that it's acquiring AWS service provider Onica from equity investor Sunstone Partners for an undisclosed amount. Coming along for the ride will be Onica's CEO Stephen Garden and CTO Tolga Tarhan, who will continue to lead their team of more than 350 employees but now answering to Sid Nair, Rackspace's GM of Americas.

The acquisition beefs up Rackspace's managed cloud services portfolio and expertise in AWS. Onica holds nine AWS competencies -- Data and Analytics, DevOps, Education, Healthcare, Industrial Software, IoT, Microsoft Workloads, Migration and Storage -- and supplies a wide range of AWS services, including managed cloud, migration, DevOps automation, Big Data and analytics, compliance and security, and Microsoft on AWS.

"By combining our capabilities with Rackspace’s global presence, resources, and scale, we will be better positioned to achieve our mission of helping customers innovate using AWS," Onica's Garden said in a statement. "We pride ourselves on delivering results for customers, and in Rackspace we have found a partner that shares our passion for providing a customer-obsessed experience."

Santa Monica-based Onica has been around since at least 1983, starting life as CorpInfo, a general-purpose IT services company. In 2017, after a $20 million funding round led by Sunstone, CorpInfo announced that was changing its name to Onica (after a service it had started in 2013), and that going forward the company would be solely focused on offering AWS consulting and managed services.

Mike Biggee, co-founder and managing director at Sunstone, said at the time that "there is no bigger transformation in IT today than the shift within the enterprise from private data centers to the use of public cloud infrastructure."

Rackspace, founded in 1998 and headquartered in the San Antonio suburb Windcrest, has offices in nine countries across four continents. To augment its cloud-focused managed services the company operates five data centers in the US, and others in London, Frankfurt, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Moscow. The company also offers direct connections to AWS and other cloud providers at numerous locations across the globe.

"This acquisition will strengthen our ability to meet all of our customer needs on AWS, and together we will have the most complete set of professional services and managed service capabilities in the industry," Rackspace CEO Kevin Jones said in a statement.

The transaction is expected to close later this year.