Rackspace to add SharePoint services with strategic acquisition

In a strategic move to appeal to clients of Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration platform, website hosting company Rackspace has acquired SharePoint911, a SharePoint consultancy.

With this acquisition, Rackspace will be adding more SharePoint support to its already robust suite of cloud tools, bringing even more revenue opportunities to the company.

Microsoft SharePoint is a central application platform for common enterprise web requirements. Although it’s not the most popular kid at school when it comes to cloud technologies, it’s used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Also Microsoft managed to sell nearly 40 million SharePoint licenses over the past six years.

The Wall Street Journal reports that all of SharePoint911’s employees, some of whom are Microsoft MVP-certified, will now be working at Rackspace.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Rackspace did confirm the deal with VentureBeat.

“For several years, Rackspace has focused on providing managed SharePoint infrastructure,” said Rackspace CTP John Engates in a statement today.

“We are thrilled to have the world-class expertise of SharePoint911 on our team to give us greater application delivery service capabilities. SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers while increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure.”

SharePoint911 was founded in 2004. Founder Shane Young said the team recognized and built upon “the principle that the complexities of SharePoint should not limit the solution’s success within an organization.

“With the support of Rackspace, we look forward to continuing that mission and spreading our capabilities within Fanatical Support to our current and future customers.”

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