Bringing the Rackspace Cloud into Spiceworks

Earlier today we announced a significant integration partnership with Rackspace, our friends 90 miles down I-35.   Spiceworks’ 950,000 IT pros can now manage Rackspace email cloud services from within the Spiceworks application (4.7 Beta — it will become generally available later this week).

Rackspace Email Widget in the Spiceworks Dashboard

The first version of this integration will show managed domains, service & mailbox types, space remaining, top users, and more.  Alerts can be set to notify the IT pro when mailboxes hit certain thresholds.  Feedback from the beta testers has been fantastic.  My favorite?  “This flippin’ rocks.”  No longer do they need to remember to log into a yet another separate management portal — it’s right there in front of them every day in Spiceworks.  Future versions will introduce the capability to add, change and further manage these accounts… and even add other services.

It’s the last statement that gets really interesting.  While we are very excited to bring the email integration to our users we’re even more excited to integrate more cloud services into Spiceworks.  Some people and companies think that it’ll be a “cloud world” overnight.  At Spiceworks we believe (and the data backs us up) that we live in a “hybrid world” where an optimized mix of on-premise and cloud services are the norm.  Our recent State of SMB IT study found that 24% of SMBs use or will use cloud services over the next six months in addition to all of the on-premise technology and services they manage.

While the SMB cloud adoption rate will continue to grow over time it’s growth is a function of the IT industry making it easy to procure and manage services and providing SMBs a good deal on a solid product.  And the only way to effectively sell to SMB IT pros is to have them talk to each other.  Oh, and the IT marketers have to find all of those SMBs.  In short, it’s a distribution and marketing problem.

By integrating cloud services directly into the Spiceworks interface we are working to make it easier to manage these cloud services.  Rackspace has stepped up and provided a discount for both Rackspace Email and hosted Microsoft Exchange. User can see what other users think about their hosted email service.  In short, Spiceworks is delivering what IT pros have asked for in helping make their lives both on-premise and in-the-cloud easier.

There are 31 million potential hosted email customers already within the Spiceworks network.  By integrating it’s Rackspace Email and hosted Microsoft Exchange services directly in Spiceworks and backing that up with it’s “Fanatical Support” we think Rackspace is off to a great start in joining Spiceworks in our mission to Simplify Everything IT!

What other services would you like to see us integrate?

Managing Rackspace Email and Hosted Microsoft Exchange Accounts in Spiceworks