Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace's cloud business.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Rackspace Hosting (www.rackspace.com) announced on Wednesday it has named chief strategy officer Lew Moorman as president of the company’s cloud business.
In his new role, Moorman will apply the company’s customer service approach, Fanatical Support, to its cloud hosting model in order to “meet customer needs and maintain Rackspace’s hosting market leadership.”
As the CSO of Rackspace, he has been responsible for the development, marketing and management of new products and services.
Most recently, Moorman has focused on the company’s entrance into both the cloud hosting and cloud applications areas by leading the launch of The Rackspace Cloud, which was formerly called Mosso.
Last month, Rackspace announced via its customer newsletter that it would gradually be transitioning from the Mosso name to The Rackspace Cloud brand. The company stressed that the pricing structure and range of services would remain the same.
This is not the first time that the company has rebranded itself. In March 2008, the company dropped the “Managed Hosting” portion of its name to create its corporate identity of Rackspace, reflecting the company’s new span of hosted services that supports multiple-sized organizations.
Moorman also helped drive the acquisitions of webmail.us, Slicehost and Jungle Disk.
“As our CSO, Lew helped guide Rackspace into many new territories, most notably cloud computing,” says Lanham Napier, president and CEO of Rackspace Hosting. “He is able to visualize the future for both our customers and our company. Cloud hosting and cloud applications are extremely important to us and that is why we’re putting Lew at the helm of these two strategic businesses.”
In October 2008, Rackspace announced its cloud hosting strategy at the Rackspace Cloud Event.
Since the event and the acquisitions of Slicehost and Jungle Disk, the Cloud Business has had several new product launches and integrations, customer wins and additions to its leadership team.
Rackspace’s cloud business consists of two divisions, Cloud Hosting and Cloud Applications.
Led by general manager Emil Sayegh, The Rackspace Cloud has significant grown over a short timespan to host hundreds of thousands of websites and applications for over 16,000 customers.
The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting through its suite of cloud solutions, which is comprised of Cloud Sites, Cloud Files and Cloud Servers.
On Thursday, Moorman presented in two presentations at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on the topic of cloud computing, including a panel discussion titled “Cloud Operations is The New Killer Job” and a session titled “Cloud Computing and the Paradigm Shift That’s Coming in IT”.
