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Rackspace demotes a CEO to hire a CEO to replace CEO who quit

Former HO and EMC man Joe Eazor gets the job of completing conversion to services company

Rackspace has named Joe Eazor as its new CEO, replacing the departing Taylor Rhodes and interim CEO Jeff Cotten.

Eazor's LinkedIn CV includes senior sales roles at EMC, time as CEO of EarthLink and seats on the boards of Commvault and Discover Financial Services. But it's probably his stint senior veep and general manager for enterprise services at pre-split HP that interested Rackspace most, because the company's canned statement has him saying “ My goal here is to … make us the world’s preeminent IT-services company.”

That goal is no surprise: Rackspace has realised it cannot go toe-to-toe with the big clouds because it is just too expensive to build bit barns. The company also picked the wrong horse with OpenStack: users have voted with their credit cards for the different approaches offered by AWS and Azure. But everything needs support and Rackspace thinks its culture of "fanatical" efforts to make things right give it the chance to take a big slice of the cloud support business.

Eazor takes over from Jeff Cotten, who had the gig for just a couple of weeks after Taylor Rhodes quit in search of a less-demanding job that would allow him to spend more time with his kids.

He's found that gig at an outfit called “SMS Assist” that describes itself as “an innovative mobile and cloud-based multisite property management company.” The Register gathers it helps property-owners to arrange maintenance and so on with a cloudy app, which doesn't sound vastly different from Rackspace, just for different types of hardware. ®

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