As one of the busiest transportation and shipping hubs on the West Coast of the United States, the Port of Seattle needed a fast, efficient, and failsafe electronic bidding system to eliminate mountains of paperwork as it launched a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar expansion of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. By choosing Bainbridge, Washington–based eBid Systems to launch its electronic bidding system, the port realized a return on its investment within a matter of weeks.

eBid offers its customers a hosted, scalable, customized, secure, and rapidly deployed procurement system with a 99.9-percent system availability guarantee. To do that, eBid relies on the services of Rackspace, a San Antonio, Texas–based company that provides enterprise-level Web infrastructure and managed services to businesses of all sizes. Serving more than 10,000 customers through its six data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies to meet each customer’s needs, and it backs up its tools and services with a commitment that it calls Fanatical Support™.

“Fanatical Support is what guides us to go above and beyond our customers’ expectations to deliver exceptional service when managing mission-critical hosting environments,” says John Engates, Rackspace’s chief technology officer.

A Dedicated Team, 24X7X365

When a company becomes a Rackspace customer, it is assigned a dedicated team that is staffed around-the-clock, 365 days a year. Each Rackspace team includes an account manager, a business development consultant, a support specialist, and support engineers.

The account manager is responsible for managing the customer’s infrastructure needs and is the direct point of contact to ensure a smooth ramp-up and address any issues that might arise. The business development consultant works with the customer and the account manager to understand the client’s configuration and business goals and offers recommendations to improve the operation and performance of the customer’s solution. The support specialist manages any issues that surface and ensures that the right teams are working on the highest-priority issues. When complex technical issues arise, certified and specialized support engineers work directly with the customer.

When clients call Rackspace, they are connected directly to a member of their dedicated team, and most issues are resolved on the spot. Through these close working partnerships, Rackspace serves as an extension of its customers’ IT departments, enabling those customers to stay focused on their core business.

“eBid came to Rackspace because they wanted to serve their clients without having to worry about issues like infrastructure and bandwidth,” says Engates. “They wanted a hosting partner that could handle all of their hosting needs as a core competency. With us, they have greater scalability than if they were to co-locate or try to maintain their own servers.”

Rackspace offers two kinds of hosting, Managed and Intensive. Rackspace Managed Hosting offers customers an a la carte approach in which they can choose only the services and products they want and easily add or remove capabilities as their needs evolve. Rackspace Intensive Hosting provides a deeper level of support for clients who need a dedicated team of IT professionals to support and work alongside their own IT department.

Services typically include advanced monitoring, load balancing, elevated security, data storage and industry-leading technical expertise. Rackspace owns the data centers, the network, the server, and other devices, and it is responsible for installing, maintaining, and monitoring the hardware infrastructure. However, its customers retain full control of their own operating systems and applications. This balance of responsibilities allows for levels of security, scalability, and uptime that far exceed those available with basic dedicated hosting and other hosting options.

Microsoft Platform Powers Rackspace

The Microsoft® platform provides the stability and flexibility Rackspace needs to maintain its premier position in the highly competitive Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business and meet customer demand for an advanced Microsoft-based hosting platform.

Windows Server® 2003 is the foundation of Rackspace’s solutions and services for customers who need a hosting environment for the Windows® platform. Rackspace uses Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to monitor customers’ Microsoft-based systems.

“MOM is a premier monitoring solution that helps improve the availability, performance, and security of Windows systems and applications,” says Engates. “Among other things, it offers centralized real-time system monitoring, automatic problem resolution, and continuous monitoring of applications.”

Rackspace’s MOM infrastructure leverages more than 17 management packs—composed of more than 7,000 rules and 139 performance threshold alerts—that monitor various aspects of server health and notify Rackspace’s IT staff about possible critical events that might require administrator intervention.

Rackspace also relies on SQL Server™ to deliver powerful database tools to customers. “Our standard support of SQL Server provides our customers with installation, initial configuration, and confirmation that their database starts properly. It also includes a maintenance plan, basic troubleshooting, response to monitoring alerts, and backup and restoration,” says Engates.

The quality of Rackspace’s services and the company’s unparalleled commitment to support has not been overlooked by customers or industry experts. Its culture of service also imbues its workforce with an esprit de corps that consistently puts Rackspace in the top ranks of small and medium-sized companies to work for. Readers of SQL Server Magazine voted Rackspace as their preferred database hosting company in 2005. Rackspace is one of only a dozen Application Infrastructure Providers in the world to receive the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner accreditation, and Microsoft recognized Rackspace as Hosting Provider of the Year in both 2003 and 2005.

“Our partnership with Microsoft has enabled terrific growth opportunities for us, and the combination of their technology with our services and support has been a tremendous benefit to our customers,” says Engates.

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© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, SQL Server, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.