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Rackspace To Cut 6% Of its U.S. Workforce

Barb Darrow
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Barb Darrow
Barb Darrow
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Barb Darrow
By
Barb Darrow
Barb Darrow
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February 8, 2017, 3:59 PM ET
Rackspace

Three months after being taken private in a $4.3 billion buyout, Rackspace is cutting 6% of its U.S. workforce along with an undisclosed number of jobs overseas.

CEO Taylor Rhodes disclosed the outlines of the plan in a blog post on Tuesday. The company confirmed to the San Antonio Business Journal that 276 of its 4,600 U.S. positions would be affected. A company spokeswoman reaffirmed the 6% figure to Fortune separately, without any other specifics.

“The U.S. layoffs and proposed international reductions are personally painful, but they are necessary and manageable,” Rhodes wrote, adding that he is confident they can be accomplished without hurting customer service.

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Rackspace has long helped customers run their information technology whether it was housed in Rackspace facilities, in the customers’ own data centers, or more recently in massive public clouds like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft (MSFT)Azure. Public clouds are massive arrays of computer servers and storage that are shared by multiple customers.

Rackspace also offers customers its own public cloud infrastructure.

For more on cloud computing, watch:

Private equity firm Apollo Management Group acquired Rackspace in a deal that closed in November. Rackspace, while known for those aforementioned services, also struggled to keep up with fast-growing public cloud players Amazon and Microsoft, which have been on a tear, marketing their own services to businesses of all sizes.

San Antonio-based Rackspace, along with NASA, helped give birth to OpenStack, a set of free open-source technology that could be used to build corporate clouds. The goal was to provide an alternative to both VMware vSphere in corporate data centers and Amazon (AMZN) in the public cloud arena.

Over the past few years, however, Rackspace has evolved to become more of a partner, as well as a competitor, to those two services.

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Barb Darrow
By Barb Darrow
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