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Rackspace Hires Joe Eazor as CEO in 2017; Kevin Jones Succeeded Him in 2019

Rackspace hired Joe Eazor in 2017 as the company focused more on managed services across public clouds. Kevin M. Jones succeeded him in 2019.
From TheFinanceBase Team2 min to read
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Rackspace announced Joe Eazor as its next CEO on May 24, 2017, with a planned start date of June 12. He replaced Taylor Rhodes as the company shifted its emphasis toward managed services and support for customers using multiple public-cloud platforms. Kevin M. Jones succeeded Eazor on April 24, 2019.

Who was Joe Eazor?

Eazor was an enterprise technology and services executive who had served as EarthLink’s chief executive officer from 2014 to 2017. Before that, he held senior roles at EMC, including executive vice president and chief operating officer of global sales and customer operations; executive positions at EDS; and the role of senior vice president and general manager of HP Enterprise Services. These career details are recorded in Commvault’s 2017 proxy statement.

Why did Rackspace hire him?

Rackspace was repositioning itself around managed cloud services as customers moved workloads beyond their own data centers and into multiple public clouds. Contemporary coverage linked Eazor’s appointment to that strategic shift: Rackspace was emphasizing partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, alongside support and management services across cloud environments.

In its announcement coverage, TechCrunch quoted Eazor describing the market opportunity as companies moved from corporate data centers into multiple clouds. He also said his goal was to build on Rackspace’s existing foundation and make it a leading IT-services company. Those statements framed the appointment as an effort to grow Rackspace’s services role in a changing cloud market, rather than simply continue its earlier focus on infrastructure hosting.

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When did Eazor lead Rackspace?

Date Event
May 2017 Taylor Rhodes left Rackspace; Jeff Cotten served as interim CEO during the transition.
May 24, 2017 Rackspace announced Eazor’s appointment as CEO.
June 12, 2017 Eazor was scheduled to begin as CEO.
April 24, 2019 Rackspace announced that Kevin M. Jones succeeded Eazor as CEO.

Rackspace’s April 24, 2019 announcement confirms Jones’s succession. For the 2017 appointment and transition, see CRN and TechCrunch.

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What was happening at Rackspace?

The leadership change followed Rackspace’s 2016 privatization. CRN reported that Apollo Global Management purchased the company for $4.3 billion that year. In the period after the deal, Rackspace placed greater emphasis on managed services and support for customers using AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Eazor’s enterprise-services experience aligned with that direction.

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Eazor’s time at EarthLink also included its acquisition by Windstream. CRN reported the transaction at $1.1 billion and described it as occurring at the end of 2016; coverage differed on when the deal closed, so the amount and broad transaction context are more reliable here than a specific closing month.

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