Rackspace Technology Revamps Partner Program With New Incentives, Growth Strategy

‘We want partners that complement our strategy and share our commitment to serving the end customer,’ says Adrianna Bustamante, vice president of partnerships and demand generation at Rackspace. ‘The relevancy of our ecosystem is at an all-time high, and we’re just getting started.’

Rackspace Technology is making a decisive move to reaffirm its commitment to the channel with a major relaunch of its partner program designed to provide long-term growth, predictability and deeper engagement for its partners.

“Technology is constantly evolving, and our partner program needed to evolve with it,” Adrianna Bustamante, vice president of partnerships and demand generation at Rackspace, told CRN. “We’ve expanded our portfolio across hybrid cloud and AI solutions, and as we target mid-market and enterprise clients our partner strategy has to reflect that growth. This relaunch is about realigning our program to bring meaningful value to partners while helping them better serve their customers and the market.”

Dubbed the “Win More. Earn More. Accelerate Your Growth” initiative, the updated partner program signals Rackspace’s renewed focus on being a channel-first company. The program’s key enhancements include account ownership, its central initiative, which enables partners to earn commissions on customer workloads indefinitely, creating a sustainable revenue model.

“We want to go deeper with our partners,” Judy Vansell, senior director of the global partner program at San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace, told CRN. “Just like we want them to win more and earn more, we want to collaborate more closely and go to market together. If a partner brings us an opportunity, we don’t just support it, we share the account ownership. Once we win it together, it becomes their account, jointly owned with Rackspace. That’s a huge differentiator.”

Other features include enhanced enablement giving partners access to new tools including marketing campaigns-in-a-box, technical resources and educational assets. The program also offers continued collaboration with cloud giants like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and VMware which are all integrated into the partner ecosystem.

“Right now, we feel like we’re the most relevant we’ve ever been with our hybrid cloud and AI strategy,” Vansell said. “We have a lot to offer partners who are struggling to understand the change in technology, where they can still succeed, and how we can help them.”

The new model places a strong emphasis on transparency and predictable returns. Partners are rewarded based on a performance-tiered structure, giving them clarity on what to expect as they grow accounts alongside Rackspace.

“It’s all about a better recurring commission model,” Bustamante said. “Even though we don’t talk specific numbers publicly, partners know what they earn on each opportunity and how that grows over time.”

The company is aiming to make the program more accessible, especially to emerging or smaller partners. Through enhanced support from the programs and operations team, every partner, regardless of size, receives the same access to sales and technical expertise.

“Rackspace stands out in the tech space because they operate across all channels, including the public sector,” Bill Santos, founder and managing partner of Westport, Conn.-based technology advisory firm TenrecX, told CRN in an email. “It’s incredibly valuable to have a partner with such a broad range of capabilities and deep expertise, it means we don’t have to manage multiple vendors for specialized needs. With Rackspace, we get end-to-end support from a single, trusted partner.”

And as Rackspace continues to refine its channel approach, the company is actively looking to expand its ecosystem with partners that align with its customer-first philosophy.

“We want partners that complement our strategy and share our commitment to serving the end customer,” said Bustamante (pictured above). “The relevancy of our ecosystem is at an all-time high, and we’re just getting started.”