Rackspace, CloudCheckr Get Together, Bolster Fanatical Support

Those who put Rackspace (News - Alert) to use in everyday operations will likely have some new features coming up, as Rackspace recently entered into a new licensing agreement with CloudCheckr. The arrangement, which came with a $7.5 million price tag (News - Alert), brings CloudCheckr's governance platform capabilities to Rackspace's Fanatical Support for AWS.

CloudCheckr has made a name for itself by bringing together several critical factors under one umbrella, including cloud automation, compliance, cost management and security intelligence. With such tools in place, companies get access to better ways to reduce risk and save money at the same time, thanks to a terrific new managed service provider option in Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS). 

With CloudCheckr's systems added to Rackspace's Fanatical Support—more specifically the Compass tool—Rackspace users can not only see what's going on in cloud spending, but also reduce risk across all AWS accounts and even get access to Reserved Instances (RI) purchasing. With RI purchases, users get access to new reserve capacity that can be used as needed, giving users a discounted hourly rate for EC2 instances. Those interested in getting in on the amplified Fanatical Support system, at last report, can do so immediately as the new product is out.

Rackspace vice president for product and engineering for Fanatical Support Erik Carlin commented, “Cloud cost and security management are top of mind for all organizations as more and more workloads move to the cloud. CloudCheckr offers a market leading platform in the cloud management space and integrating the CloudCheckr tooling into our Fanatical Support for AWS offer enables us to provide customers and Rackspace engineers and architects with powerful capabilities to optimize spend and mitigate risk in the cloud.”

Such partnerships seldom go awry; while there's often something to be said for simplicity in a product line, there's also something to be said for extra features, especially when those extra features deliver value in the same way that the CloudCheckr and Rackspace partnership likely will. Improved visibility into systems is generally helpful, and that visibility can often go toward reduced management and reduced costs from there. It's hard to turn down such a package, especially should it be included as part of a wider product offering, and the new Rackspace has given itself a real leg up on potential competitors in the field thanks to valuable new features that will likely help save money long-term.

Effectively, Rackspace has made its Fanatical Support and Compass (News - Alert) systems more valuable with the addition of CloudCheckr's lineup, and there should be plenty of takers interested in making the most of this new product maneuver.