blog It’s been less than a year since global hosting and cloud computing giant Rackspace confirmed plans to launch a dedicated datacentre in Sydney, but what you may not know is that for quite a while before that (three years in fact), the company’s founding local country manager Mark Randall had been building up Rackspace’s business in Australia, after a previous career with the hosting company internationally. With the Australian business established and local infrastructure developed, Randall revealed this morning that he was planning to make a move to one of Rackspace’s strongest and fastest-growing Australian rivals — Bulletproof. The media release:
Bulletproof, the mission critical hosting provider that now powers more than 500 enterprise, government and corporate customers including BlueScope Steel, Movember and Nova FM, has today announced that Mark Randall will be joining its Executive Team as Director of Sales and Marketing.
In this new role, Mark will lead the go-to-market strategy as well as Sales & Marketing operations for Bulletproof. This includes Bulletproof’s Managed AWS, Australia’s first, fully managed offering for the industry-standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Since its launch in October 2012, Bulletproof has seen strong uptake of Managed AWS from customers including Universal Music Australia and Mortgage Choice.
Prior to Bulletproof, Mark spent 7 years at Rackspace, including 4 years leading the Rackspace Australia business that he founded in 2009 and will be joining Bulletproof’s head office in Sydney, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Lorenzo Modesto.
“We are thrilled to have someone of Mark’s calibre and experience join Bulletproof as we continue our rapid growth. Mark’s background demonstrates that he shares our passion for delivering great customer service. His appointment follows on from Kylie Turner’s move from Hostworks to Bulletproof, and will ensure we solidify our position as Australia’s mission critical hosting leader.” Modesto said.
“This appointment will also allow us to maximise opportunities to further expand our business based on our leading public, private and hybrid managed cloud platforms including AWS and VMware, and will be the first of several announcements in the coming months”, he added.
Those of you who’ve been following Delimiter for a while will know that we’ve got a lot of time for Bulletproof. After outgrowing several other web hosting companies (which were, nevertheless, very good for their period with us), quite a while ago we migrated to Bulletproof, which also hosts other major local publishers and forums such as Whirlpool, Mumbrella and Mamamia. Since that time, we’ve had a great experience with the company from both a customer service and technical support perspective — even though we tend to ring them up sometimes at 10pm at night to request extra server resources when our controversial articles end up on the front page of Reddit, Slashdot, Whirlpool, Hacker News and Techmeme simultaneously, causing massive traffic spikes.
With this in mind, although we don’t have anything negative to say about Rackspace — and we’ve heard very good things about it as well — we can’t help but view Randall’s move as entirely a good thing. It’s great that large foreign players such as Rackspace, Amazon, Microsoft and so on are currently setting up datacentres in Australia; but we also like to root for local players, and Bulletproof is emerging as one of the better ones. And no, I’m not getting paid to say that. In fact, we’re paying them.
Rackspace has also moved quickly to replace Randall, with the company reportedly issuing a statement this morning noting that it had appointed its existing local director of operations Angus Dorney as its new country manager. It’ll be interesting to see if the company can keep up its local momentum with Randall departed.
Image credit: Rackspace
You trying to get a a discount?
Comments are closed.