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Yes—but specifically in Gartner’s first European Magic Quadrant for cloud-enabled managed hosting, published in 2014. Gartner placed Rackspace in the Leaders quadrant, and the contemporaneous report described it as the market leader. That is a historical ranking, not evidence of who leads the market today.
What Gartner’s European Magic Quadrant covered
Gartner’s category, as described in the July 18, 2014 Data Center Knowledge report, combined three elements: cloud-enabled infrastructure for compute, network and storage; cloud-management software; and managed services for applications running on that infrastructure. It was therefore narrower than a ranking of all cloud providers or all hosting companies: the focus was managed application services delivered on cloud infrastructure.
The report was Gartner’s first European Magic Quadrant for this category. Its two axes were ability to execute and completeness of vision. A Leader placement reflected strength across those dimensions; it was not a published market-share, revenue, customer-count or growth ranking. The article supplied no such market statistics.
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How Rackspace compared with other providers
Rackspace was presented as strong on both of Gartner’s axes, supported by its managed-cloud strategy and services intended to manage customers’ application stacks running on Rackspace infrastructure cloud. The article also named providers in other parts of the field:
#1 Best Overall
| Provider or group | Position described in the 2014 report |
|---|---|
| Rackspace | Leader; reported as the market leader |
| Interoute and Colt Technology Services | Described as close to Rackspace on ability to execute and completeness of vision |
| BT Global Services, Claranet, Verizon and CenturyLink | Included in the European competitive field; the article did not assign a more specific position here |
| Attenda, IBM and AT&T | Placed in the Challengers section |
| NTT, Fujitsu, Telefonica, Vodafone, Sungard, Easynet and SFR | Listed as niche players |
| Visionaries | No providers were placed in this section |
Buyer trade-offs Gartner identified
Data-center geography and residency
The report said Rackspace had no data-center presence outside the UK. That could be significant for customers whose European data-residency requirements called for hosting in another country, or whose workloads were sensitive to latency from locations farther from the UK. The ranking should not be read as assurance that Rackspace met every customer’s geographic or regulatory requirements.
Firewall capabilities
Rackspace lacked an integrated self-service firewall in the offering described. Customers needing firewall protection therefore had to consider host-based firewalls or dedicated managed firewall appliances, rather than assume they could configure an integrated service themselves.
Portal consistency
The article said Rackspace was still rationalizing its global portal strategy. Global customers could encounter different interfaces and logins, a practical operational drawback even if the underlying managed services were suitable.
Managed application-stack operations
Rackspace’s managed-cloud push mattered because the category assessed services for applications running on cloud infrastructure, not just access to compute, network and storage. Buyers comparing providers would need to check how much application-stack management each provider actually undertook, alongside Gartner’s execution and vision axes. The article does not give a provider-by-provider breakdown of those service boundaries.
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What the report does—and does not—establish
Gartner’s 2014 assessment supports a time-specific conclusion: Rackspace led the Leaders quadrant in the first European Magic Quadrant for cloud-enabled managed hosting, with Interoute and Colt described as close on the two evaluation axes. It does not establish Rackspace’s present-day position, quantify its share of the European market, or show that it was the best choice for every workload or country.
The same Data Center Knowledge article quoted Rackspace CTO John Engates saying, “Fifteen years ago, when scores of companies rented out access to single-tenant servers with little or no support, we at Rackspace created the managed hosting business.” The report immediately qualified that origin claim: Gartner analyst Lydia Leong disputed it, citing managed-hosting providers operating since at least 1995, including Exodus, Digex, UUNET, IBM and AT&T. Engates’s statement should therefore be treated as a company-origin claim, not an independently established account of who created managed hosting.
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