London – November 13, 2003 – Rackspace Managed Hosting Europe, the leading managed hosting provider, has been awarded the prestigious Learning Organisation Award for service excellence. The Service Excellence Awards are given to UK companies in recognition of outstanding customer...

London – November 13, 2003 – Rackspace Managed Hosting Europe, the leading managed hosting provider, has been awarded the prestigious Learning Organisation Award for service excellence. The Service Excellence Awards are given to UK companies in recognition of outstanding customer service and employee relations. The award sponsors include The Cranfield School of Management and Unisys.

Dominic Monkhouse, managing director, Rackspace Managed Hosting Europe, comments: “We were pleased to be short listed in 2002 but this made us even more determined to make sure that we won in 2003! We decided to review all the processes and procedures that affect each of our customer’s experience with us. This meant surveying our customer base more thoroughly and regularly to help us further develop our customer initiatives and get even closer to our customers. This has enabled us to view our organisation from the outside in and resulted in even better people and services. We were even commended for our willingness to take on new ideas across the business. Winning this award in 2003 is recognition of our dedication to Fanatical Support™ and our employees’ commitment to develop and deliver outstanding service every day.”

Brian Hadfield, managing director of Unisys Limited believes: “Each company has to find its own answer to service excellence but the companies recognised in the awards have set a benchmark for others and should provide inspiration for service improvement.”

The Service Excellence Awards aim to identify and recognise organisations operating in the UK that are industry leaders at serving customers. The awards also help organisations identify their strengths and weaknesses whilst providing benchmarks and guidance to help organisations improve performance. Key criteria assessed by the judges include: customer intelligence, operational effectiveness, engaging people, leadership and values, and organisational agility.

Peter Dunham, CTO at Affiliate Window, pays testament to Rackspace’s high service levels: “As an online business we require the best service available to ensure that our systems are fully operational 24x7x365, even during major upgrades to software and hardware. Following a very unhappy period of poor service and intermittent periods of downtime with another hosting provider, and after speaking to all the major UK hosting companies, we chose to work with Rackspace. It’s very seldom that a company’s service matches its sales pitch – but in this case it has exceeded it, it’s fantastic!”

About Rackspace Managed Hosting
Founded in 1998 with locations in Europe and the USA, Rackspace Managed Hosting provides its award winning managed Web hosting services and unique brand of customer service, Fanatical Support™, to a broad range of enterprises. Focusing exclusively on managed hosting, Rackspace supplies the necessary infrastructure – servers, software, bandwidth and management – needed to run almost any hosted solution.

The company’s philosophy of Fanatical Support™ has made Rackspace one of the fastest growing companies in the world. A profitable company with revenue of £30 million, Rackspace grew organically by 50% in 2002 and now has more than 550,000 domains under management for 5,000 customers.

Rackspace has received numerous industry awards for its Fanatical Support™ including, most recently, the Frost & Sullivan Customer Value Enhancement (CVE) Award and the prestigious Learning Organisation Award for Customer Service Excellence, sponsored by Management Today magazine in association with Unisys. For more information, visit www.rackspace.co.uk or call 0800 085 3973.