Rackspace to Acquire Onica, a Cloud-Native Consulting and Managed Services Company

Rackspace announced that it has agreed to acquire Onica, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider. This acquisition brings Onica’s innovative professional services capabilities – including strategic advisory, architecture and engineering and application development – to the Rackspace portfolio, complementing its existing managed cloud services capabilities. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Onica has rapidly grown to more than 350 highly-skilled consultants across North America. The company holds nine AWS competencies across Data and Analytics, DevOps, Education, Healthcare, Industrial Software, IoT, Microsoft Workloads, Migration and Storage. Onica has been a regular on Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list and ranked fifth on the CRNFast Growth 150 list. As a cloud-native services company, Onica helps customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and deliver incredible experiences by bringing the innovative capabilities of the cloud to some of the most complex technology projects in the world.

“As a cloud pioneer, Onica has established itself as one of the largest pure-play AWS consultancies, with an unmatched reputation for true capability leadership with AWS and customers,” said Kevin Jones, CEO of Rackspace. “This acquisition will strengthen our ability to meet all of our customer needs on AWS, and together, we will have the most complete set of professional services and managed service capabilities in the industry. Rackspace is known for providing Fanatical Experience to its customers and Onica’s customer-first mindset is a natural culture fit. We are thrilled to welcome Stephen, Tolga and the talented Onica team to the Racker family.”

The demand for professional services for public cloud is rapidly growing and customers are continuing to adopt advanced cloud solutions. The acquisition of Onica will enhance and extend Rackspace’s offering to customers who are quickly maturing on AWS and seeking high-end professional services spanning the full spectrum of expertise in the cloud. 

“By combining our capabilities with Rackspace’s global presence, resources and scale, we will be better positioned to achieve our mission of helping customers innovate using AWS,” said Stephen Garden, CEO of Onica. “We pride ourselves on delivering results for customers, and in Rackspace we have found a partner that shares our passion for providing a customer-obsessed experience.”

The transaction is expected to close in late fourth quarter of 2019. Garden and Onica Chief Technology Officer Tolga Tarhan will continue to lead the Onica team, reporting to Sid Nair, General Manager of Americas at Rackspace. 

Both companies are privately held, with Rackspace owned by affiliates of certain funds of Apollo Global Management, LLC and certain co-investors. Onica is a portfolio company of Sunstone Partners.