Rackspace: Using Google Cloud to centralize, democratize petabytes of data
About Rackspace
Rackspace is a global provider of managed cloud services, with offices worldwide. A Google Cloud partner, Rackspace helps companies reduce management complexity and strain on IT resources with white-glove, personalized customer hosting solutions.
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Contact usGoogle Cloud is helping Rackspace solve for data democratization and unification challenges resulting from fragmented strategies for managing information.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces time to insight from months to weeks
- Consolidates 320 dashboards into 20 centrally managed, high-quality resources
- Consolidates 74 operational data sources, four data warehouses, one data lake, and 12 years of history from on-premises to Google Cloud
- Migrates to Google Cloud within just six months
Saves $1.2 million on licensing fees by decommissioning 20 servers
Organizations today recognize that their data management strategies can make or break their success. As a result, many have begun to modernize their analytics practices and enable better data-driven decisions.
The big challenge is that data democratization relies on many moving parts working in concert, including governance, storage, organization, accessibility, and more. While this is a massive undertaking, the results of the effort are transformative.
Rackspace, a global managed cloud service provider, decided to modernize their analytics in the fall of 2019. With thousands of employees working in offices worldwide, as well as a massive customer base, the company generates a tremendous amount of data. It launched a new business unit, the Global Data Office (GDO), to begin centralizing and unifying its approach to information management and governance.
“The goal wasn’t just to democratize data, but also to elevate data management across the business,” says Juan Riojas, Chief Data Officer at Rackspace. “We have a huge amount of data and need a way to use it as an asset to accelerate our time to value. We want to take advantage of all the ways we could use data to improve personalization and customer experiences and decrease customer churn.”
Up until late last year, virtually all of the company’s siloed data was managed on-premises, which caused issues with scalability. The company also had sprawling IT resources that made it difficult to streamline data access and insights; this created challenges across data governance, storage, organization, accessibility, and more. As a long-time Google Cloud customer and partner, Rackspace decided to leverage Google Cloud solutions to improve its data management strategies and infrastructure.
“As a company of technology experts, we wanted to harmonize all data into one place, which is a big challenge for organizations of all sizes. We chose BigQuery as the foundation for our data management efforts because it offered several advantages, including our organizational comfort with the technologies, a tightly aligned system architecture, advanced analytics, and power through simplicity.”
—Juan Riojas, Chief Data Officer, RackspaceIdentifying areas for data quality improvements
When Juan was brought onto the team to create the Global Data Office and act as the company’s Chief Data Officer, the company had 74 operational data stores. These data stores were fragmented and siloed, with different business units using varied databases along with inconsistent rules and practices. This translated to 13 or 14 different versions of the same metric dashboards in some instances, complicating analysis.
“As a company of technology experts, we wanted to harmonize all data into one place, which is a big challenge for organizations of all sizes,” says Juan. “We chose BigQuery as the foundation for our data management efforts because it offered several advantages, including our organizational comfort with the technologies, a tightly aligned system architecture, advanced analytics, and power through simplicity.”
The efforts covered almost all the data that had been, and was being, generated across the company, including information from CRM and ERP systems, server monitoring logs, and internal data streams. Rackspace also traditionally used several ETL tools and wanted to unify managing that data too.
With the GDO on the job, Rackspace began to quickly reduce complexities and harmonize its systems with Google Cloud. Together, Rackspace and Google Cloud centralized all their data and established data integrity measures so that Rackspace employees could operate their data with trust.
“The old adage of ‘if you can measure it, you can improve it,’ was especially true here. Since moving to Google Cloud and achieving greater data harmony, we have seen a 10x improvement in our Net Promoter Scores.”
—Juan Riojas, Chief Data Officer, RackspaceAchieving data harmony
As a result, Rackspace’s GDO migrated and consolidated 74 operational data sources, four data warehouses, one data lake, and 12 years of history to Google Cloud.
“The level of complexity we were dealing with was enormous, and really at petabyte scale with very few standards,” says Juan. “We successfully migrated all of it into Google Cloud within six months, which is phenomenal. We could not have accomplished that on another platform.”
Achieving this migration has had immediate financial benefits for Rackspace, as it has so far decommissioned 20 servers, leading to more than 1 million dollars in savings on SQL Server licenses alone. Operational benefits are arguably more profound, as the company has reduced the number of dashboards used by departments from more than 300 to 20.
“Efficiency and an analytical approach to decision-making were vital goals of this project. We have already started to see the advantages associated with achieving those objectives,” says Juan.
Increased customer satisfaction
Internal data-driven decision-making, as well as visibility into customer experiences, uncovered a new universe of opportunities across Rackspace. Since it is a subscription-based company, perhaps the biggest win from this type of project would be to increase customer satisfaction and decrease churn.
“The old adage of ‘if you can measure it, you can improve it,’ was especially true here,” says Juan. “Since moving to Google Cloud and achieving greater data harmony, we have seen a 10x improvement in our Net Promoter Scores.”
“In my experience, the sheer number of integrations Google Cloud offers is impressive. There’s a connector between Google Cloud and virtually everything else we need in our environment. It helped a lot in our efforts to unify our data creation, storage, management, analytics, and delivery efforts.”
—Lara Indrikovs, Director, Product Management, Global Data, RackspaceIn addition to the data-related infrastructure migration, Rackspace also wanted to migrate its entire BI platform to a new solution. Once data was more unified and consistent, the company would still need a uniform approach to intelligence and analytics to get the most out of stored information. Currently, the company is using Qlik on top of BigQuery as its BI solution.
“In my experience, the sheer number of integrations Google Cloud offers is impressive,” says Lara Indrikovs, Director of Product Management for Global Data at Rackspace. “There’s a connector between Google Cloud and virtually everything else we need in our environment, which helped a lot in our efforts to unify our data creation, storage, management, analytics, and delivery efforts.”
Passing on benefits to customers
With greater resource sharing, faster access to data insights across the business, and enhanced visibility of data and systems, Rackspace is acting as a testament to the value of a massive data democratization effort.
“This success positions us very well,” says Juan. “We are setting a great example of how to use these services. And we are working 100 percent in the cloud to leverage the power of analytics.”
Google Cloud solutions have enabled the Rackspace GDO, with a team of roughly 50 employees, to support the data needs of the company’s 6,500 employees. Rackspace now uses seamless integrations between BigQuery, TensorFlow, Cloud Source Repositories, and other tools to enable its own staff to better serve customers.
“There’s clear benefits in how we can serve customers,” says Lara. “By reducing the time to insight thanks to better data integrity and accuracy, we enable truly optimized customer experiences. This wouldn’t have been possible without having everything in one environment. The diversity and power of Google Cloud solutions along with strong integration across the environment really shine.”
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About Rackspace
Rackspace is a global provider of managed cloud services, with offices worldwide. A Google Cloud partner, Rackspace helps companies reduce management complexity and strain on IT resources with white-glove, personalized customer hosting solutions.