Bryan Litchford, Vice President of Private Cloud at Rackspace Technology in the following Q&A highlights the difference between hybrid and multi-cloud setups for enterprise customers, and more on how AI and automation are reshaping cloud environments.

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Hi Bryan, walk us through your career journey and what brought you to your current role as VP of Private Cloud at Rackspace Technology.

I’ve had an eventful path leading to my role as the Product Management and Engineering leader for Private Cloud.  I started at Rackspace leading operations teams within our East Coast Data Centers.  Loudon County, VA is the Data Center Capital of the world and the concentration of talent there is astounding.  I learned so much so quickly.  It was an incredible introduction into Clouds.  From the Data Centers I moved up the tech stack and led our customer onboarding functions globally which included both project management and technical delivery teams.  Great opportunity to dive into the transitions from our Account Executives to on-going Operations.  About 3 years ago I moved into our Product Organization, the experience from literally racking and cabling hardware to end-to-end delivery of our products has been invaluable in my Product role.

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How does Rackspace Technology’s private cloud support and improve hybrid and multi-cloud setups for enterprise customers?

 5 or 6 years ago most organizations ran workloads on-prem, with a more traditional hosting provider, or on a hyperscaler with most of their footprint in one of those locations.  The rapid evolution in the last few years has driven a change in strategy.  Rackspace leans into what workloads operate best across the cloud landscape.  Given the breadth of platforms and industry verticals our clients operate in, we leverage those learnings to evaluate the next use-case or next environment need.  We’ve gone through the development and operational experience of running workloads across different clouds and use that to custom tailor an IT infrastructure strategy the best meets our clients performance and commercial needs.

Highlight the top challenges organizations face when transitioning to a private cloud and the solutions Rackspace Technology offers to address them. 

Change is hard, whether you are repatriating a workload from a hyperscaler or looking at moving out of an on-prem data center, the sheer complexity and unknowns of that move are often top of mind.  In addition to the complexity, CIOs and CTOs need to think about their team’s time and talent.  These transitions need to happen while the business is still moving forward and innovating.

Rackspace offers AMP, our accelerated migration program with the objective to eliminate the financial and technical burden of migrating.  Depending on the platforms and applications moving, we pull in expertise from our Professional Services or Elastic Engineering teams and build a program to plan, test, and execute the transition.  Rackspace has completed hundreds of these migrations from SaaS providers to Banking applications, to critical Healthcare workloads such as EHR systems.

AI and automation are reshaping how cloud environments are managed. Please share how Rackspace incorporates AI-driven solutions and automation tools to optimize private cloud operations for its clients.

Rackspace is all-in on automation and taking a clear measured approach on how we integrate AI.  With hundreds of thousands of servers under management, we couldn’t operate without a robust automation framework.  As a service provider for over 25 years, we’ve had the opportunity to innovate and invest across provisioning to day 2 operations, and how to secure and audit environments.  Some of that innovation led Rackspace to co-founding OpenStack with NASA.

On the AI front, our approach is to explore and prove out both capability and effectiveness before introducing technologies to our fleet.  Rackspace is both developing and leveraging AI internally as well as launching platforms to host and operate AI solutions for clients. In 2023, we launched the Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR) in an effort to meet customers’ growing needs with the rise of AI. We’ve been quick to introduce chat agents to our engineers that can search and aggregate knowledge but these agents do not have the agency to perform tasks on their own. The landscape is iterating rapidly and I’m excited to see where the next year or two take us.

Can you talk about how green data centers and sustainable technologies fit into Rackspace’s long-term strategy for private cloud solutions?

 There is no question that adopting sustainable technologies to our platforms help both our clients and Rackspace in the long term.  Rather than go it alone, we’ve chosen to partner on data center footprints rather than build ourselves.  We can lean on our LEED certified partners and select locations while freeing up our engineering teams to optimize further up the stack.  As we continue to optimize, we are looking at projects big and small, how do we maximize the density and utilization of the space we have, to automating the delivery and provisioning of hardware minimizing the time a server is powered on without being actively used.

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Looking ahead, please share major innovations in the private cloud space that excite you the most.

Great question and there is so much on the horizon to look forward to. 

1. Opensource Container and Virtualization Platforms – So much change in the market when it comes to compute layer technologies, and the innovation here is astounding from new capabilities on Kubernetes to full stack virtualization platforms.

2. Edge Computing Evolution – Along with AI, solutions at the edge are becoming more common, whether a retail solution or powering a hospital these small scale Private Cloud stacks are changing the traditional thinking to how a footprint should run.

3. AI – Specifically for Private Clouds, I think the increased agency of AI models to not only alert or aggregate information but evolve to take action is going to be interesting to watch. It will change the way we focus engineering efforts and how we interact with the platforms and applications.

Thank you, Bryan, for sharing your insights with us.

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