Rackspace to Acquire Onica

By Ken Briodagh November 05, 2019

Rackspace recently announced that it has agreed to acquire Onica, an Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider. This acquisition brings Onica’s professional services capabilities – including strategic advisory, architecture and engineering and application development – to the Rackspace (News - Alert) 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 (News - Alert) Workloads, Migration and Storage. 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, 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 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.

“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, 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.”

Evercore acted as sole financial advisor to Rackspace on the transaction. Barclays acted as sole financial advisor to Onica.


Ken Briodagh is a storyteller, writer and editor with about two decades of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.

Edited by Ken Briodagh


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