Rackspace is a leading global managed cloud solutions provider. Until recently, its broadly dispersed employees used disparate collaboration tools that impeded global teamwork. Rackspace replaced these tools and deployed Microsoft Office 365. Now close to 6,000 employees work more efficiently across business units, making the most of their new capabilities to collaborate and achieve more in less time. Plus, the US-based company is saving time and money—$411,000 in annual licensing savings for one product alone.

“OneDrive is invaluable for team collaboration. It allows me to efficiently monitor the status of several Rackspace businesses, representing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.”

—Keith Fafel, Chief of Staff, Cloud, Apps & Data, Rackspace

Rackspace accelerates global collaboration and saves $411,000 with Office 365

Rackspace www.rackspace.com 5,800 employees United StatesProfessional services

Company profileBased in San Antonio, Texas, Rackspace is a leading managed cloud provider, helping businesses in 150 countries take advantage of cloud computing, without the complexity of managing it themselves.

As more than half of Fortune 100 companies can attest, Rackspace is an expert at helping its customers transform their businesses through the benefits of cloud computing. The company recently applied that same expertise to its own operations, deploying Microsoft Office 365 to its nearly 6,000 employees. Now that all employees, nicknamed “Rackers,” use a standard suite of cloud-based services, Rackspace is facilitating collaboration and improving productivity across 15 global offices and six business units.

“Our cloud journey is a little different from many companies,” says Bill Hall, Director of Service Desk Operations at Rackspace. “We already had a culture of agility and innovation. Rackers routinely form ad hoc teams to accomplish targeted goals. However, business units used all sorts of productivity and collaboration tools, which made global teamwork difficult. We chose Office 365 to replace about 30 tools in our environment. Now we have one productivity platform that matches how we love to work: fast, connected, and mobile.”

Intuitive collaboration platformRackspace retired its separate solutions in favor of interoperable services within the Office 365 suite. “We saw that Microsoft OneDrive for Business is an enterprise-grade cloud storage solution,” says Keith Fafel, Chief of Staff, Cloud, Apps & Data, at Rackspace. “Rackers access online Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from OneDrive, edit them in the browser, and save them back to the cloud in one seamless experience. They couldn’t do that with our previous tools.”

In his role overseeing several Rackspace business units, Fafel coordinates the development of weekly updates for each business unit, including sales, revenue, marketing traction, and other key performance indicators. His OneDrive sync client runs in the background, always syncing Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents uploaded to OneDrive by approximately 30 contributors during the week. That way, he can quickly prepare for weekly meetings with executives. “OneDrive is invaluable for team collaboration,” says Fafel. “It allows me to efficiently monitor the status of several Rackspace businesses, representing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.”

One source of truth for mobile workersJason Himmelstein, Technical Strategy Director and Microsoft MVP at Rackspace, works with virtual teams to coauthor proposal requests and training documents using Microsoft SharePoint Online and OneDrive—even from their mobile phones. “We can now respond faster to business opportunities by collaborating using SharePoint and OneDrive, helping us provide better customer service,” he says. “Sharing is simple. I just go into the team site document library, find a file, select Share, type a colleague’s name and choose whether to grant Edit or View rights, and select Save. The system immediately sends that person an email with a link to the document in SharePoint. We didn’t have this ‘share with me’ team concept with our previous service.”

“We chose Office 365 to replace about 30 tools in our environment. Now we have one productivity platform that matches how we love to work: fast, connected, and mobile.”

—Bill Hall, Director of

Service Desk Operations, Rackspace

Popular and cost effective Rackspace successfully migrated to OneDrive early in its rollout of Office 365. The company accomplished the switch in record time, and Hall was able to announce: “We moved more than 11 million files consisting of 27 terabytes of data. This was the fastest OneDrive migration of this size done in partnership with Microsoft to date.”

To accomplish the migration in just six weeks—after testing and piloting—Rackspace worked closely with Microsoft FastTrack, the customer success service included for qualifying Office 365 customers. The FastTrack team recommended how to parse the nightly migrations and increased the number of virtual machines allocated to the project to achieve higher throughputs. “We had a fantastic experience with the FastTrack service,” says Hall. “Our single point of contact within the FastTrack Team worked tirelessly to ensure we made our deadline.”

Today, more than 4,000 Rackers use OneDrive, compared with the 3,000 that used the previous service. Hall credits this increase to the service’s interoperability with Office apps, made even more useful for Rackers, all of whom have access to the latest version of Office on up to five devices, thanks to Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus. “No matter where Rackers are, or what device they use, they can always access and share their files,” says Hall. “And because the OneDrive sync function works equally well on Macs, that includes our 2,000 Mac users.”

Significant annual cost savings add to the value of OneDrive for Rackspace. “We are saving more than $411,000 annually in licensing costs by retiring our previous service and using OneDrive, which comes with Office 365 at no extra cost to us,” says Hall.

Global workforce working more productivelyAll Rackers have access to Microsoft Exchange Online and to SharePoint team sites for collaboration. After coauthoring sales and marketing collateral for the launch of a new Rackspace product, Himmelstein moved the final documents from OneDrive to a SharePoint team site. Now, sales representatives can easily find those files, as well as a shared calendar, links to Salesforce reports and forecasts, team opportunities, and monthly forecasting. And thanks to a new Activity View on the home page, they receive an alert every time someone adds or updates a new document to the site.

According to Hall, Rackspace has almost finished its global deployment of Exchange Online and is testing Skype for Business Online. Some Rackers have embraced Microsoft Teams for chat-based collaboration, Microsoft Planner for ad hoc project management, and Microsoft StaffHub as a scheduling tool. And a few business units use Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow to create small line of business apps. “Our employees work more efficiently using Office 365, and now we have a standardized environment that’s easy to manage,” concludes Hall. “We’ve brought companywide productivity up a level and accelerated the pace of business.”

“We are saving more than $411,000 annually in licensing costs by retiring our previous service and using OneDrive, which comes with Office 365 at no extra cost to us.”

—Bill Hall, Director of

Service Desk Operations, Rackspace

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published May 2017

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Microsoft Office 365The new Office provides anywhere access to your familiar Office applications—plus email, calendar, videoconferencing, and your most current documents—on almost any device, from PCs to smartphones to tablets.

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Software and ServicesMicrosoft Flow Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Exchange OnlineMicrosoft Office 365 ProPlus Microsoft OneDrive for BusinessMicrosoft PlannerMicrosoft SharePoint OnlineMicrosoft StaffHubMicrosoft TeamsSkype for Business Online

Microsoft FastTrackMicrosoft PowerApps