Yes—according to a July 18, 2014 Data Center Knowledge report on Gartner’s first European Magic Quadrant for cloud-enabled managed hosting, Rackspace was placed in the Leaders quadrant and described as the market leader. That was a historical assessment of a defined managed-cloud category, not evidence of Rackspace’s current market position.
What Gartner’s European Magic Quadrant measured
Gartner’s category combined cloud-enabled infrastructure—compute, network and storage—with cloud-management software and managed services. Its focus was on managing applications running on cloud infrastructure, rather than simply renting servers or selling unbundled cloud capacity.
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The Magic Quadrant assessed providers on two axes: ability to execute and completeness of vision. The 2014 report was the first European Magic Quadrant for this category. It did not establish market shares, revenue rankings, customer counts or growth rates.
How Rackspace and its competitors were positioned
The Data Center Knowledge account described Rackspace as the leader and placed it in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant. Interoute and Colt Technology Services were the closest named competitors to Rackspace on both ability to execute and completeness of vision.
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| Provider or group | Position reported in the 2014 account |
|---|---|
| Rackspace | Leader; described as the market leader |
| Interoute and Colt Technology Services | Close to Rackspace on both Gartner axes |
| BT Global Services, Claranet, Verizon and CenturyLink | Named in the European competitive field |
| Attenda, IBM and AT&T | Challengers |
| NTT, Fujitsu, Telefonica, Vodafone, Sungard, Easynet and SFR | Niche players |
| Visionaries quadrant | No providers listed |
The report’s positioning was a comparative analyst assessment, not a numerical measure of how much business each provider had won. It offers no basis for inferring a provider’s revenue, customer base or market share.
Why Rackspace ranked highly—and what buyers needed to weigh
Managed application operations
The report highlighted Rackspace’s push into managed cloud services, including services intended to manage customers’ application stacks running on Rackspace’s infrastructure cloud. That emphasis fit the category’s focus on managed applications, not infrastructure alone.
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Data-center geography and residency
Gartner cautioned that Rackspace had no data-center presence outside the UK. For a customer whose European data-residency requirements called for infrastructure in another country—or whose users needed lower latency from a nearer location—that footprint could be a material constraint. The report did not specify which residency rules applied to individual customers; buyers would need to assess their own legal and operational requirements.
Firewall provision
The report noted that Rackspace lacked an integrated self-service firewall. Customers therefore needed to consider host-based firewalls or dedicated managed firewall appliances instead. That distinction matters when comparing operational control, deployment workflow and the responsibilities assigned to a customer’s own team.
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Rackspace’s global portal strategy was still being rationalized, according to the account. Global customers could consequently encounter different interfaces and logins rather than a consistent experience across services or regions.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the ranking can—and cannot—tell a buyer
For a 2014 procurement decision, the ranking was one input alongside a provider’s geography, security model, management tooling and application-operations scope. A buyer could use the report to identify Rackspace, Interoute and Colt as closely positioned options, then test whether each provider met the buyer’s specific requirements. The listed limitations show why a Leaders placement alone was not a substitute for checking data location, firewall options and portal workflows.
The article also 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 account itself treated that origin claim as difficult to confirm. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong disputed it, pointing to managed-hosting providers operating since at least 1995, including Exodus, Digex, UUNET, IBM and AT&T. The quotation is therefore a company-origin claim, not an independently established history of the market.
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