Pangea Foundation Leverages Rackspace Cloud Hosting for IT Needs

SaaS Provider, Pangea, to use Rackspace Web Hosting Platform to Deliver Instant and Scalable Natural Disaster Recovery Software Solutions

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, Nov 17, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Rackspace(R) Hosting’s (RAX) cloud division, Mosso(R), today announced that Pangea Foundation(TM), an innovative non-profit SaaS provider that delivers enterprise-class software solutions to non-profit organizations, is using Cloud Sites(TM) to provide hosted services to a growing number of its 1,500 non-profit customers. Pangea has been a Rackspace managed hosting customer since early 2007, and also utilizes hosted Exchange mailboxes from Mailtrust, Rackspace’s email hosting division and most recently came to Mosso for assistance in providing online natural disaster support.

After creating the disaster relief software solutions used by 211 San Diego during the 2007 San Diego fires and by 211 Iowa during the 2008 Midwest floods, Pangea quickly realized that cloud computing technologies are the ideal solution for fast-moving conditions associated with natural disasters which require quick set up and the ability to handle huge traffic spikes. As a result, Pangea turned to Rackspace’s cloud hosting solution, Cloud Sites, to instantly deploy software that provided much-needed information to the many victims of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike along the Gulf Coast in August of this year. The solution was simple, easy to set up and affordable, using a cost-effective, pay-as-you-grow pricing model which provided Pangea cost savings when site traffic was low.

“In addition to using Rackspace’s managed hosting offering to run our mission-critical software applications, we now rely on Cloud Sites during natural disasters to get our 211 sites up fast and to meet the demand that can be caused by unpredictable traffic spikes,” said Kraig Kuipers, president and CEO, Pangea Foundation. “Rackspace has indeed created a hosting portfolio to meet all our IT needs with a suite of solutions that provide scalability and reliability at a lower cost.”

“When we calculated the time saved by working with Rackspace’s suite of hosting solution offerings, we discovered that we had achieved a 50 percent reduction in total cost of ownership compared to our previous hosting environment” said Kristin Kuipers, Founder and Director of Programs at Pangea Foundation. “The Cloud Hosting solution from Rackspace has proven to be a key contributor to our success, enabling us to deliver instantly scalable enterprise-class software and IT infrastructure solutions to non-profit organizations.”

Working with leading technology providers such as Rackspace, Qualcomm and Microsoft, Pangea will soon launch ReliefPoint(TM), a web-based software solution that will be offered to disaster relief and crisis management organizations nationwide. Their vision is to transform a predominately ad-hoc, paper-based structure into a robust and infinitely scalable hosted solution that ensures these organizations are prepared to deal with the next disaster—before it happens.

“Nothing is more important to our Cloud Hosting Solution than providing the highest level of scalability for our customers’ environments, when they most need them,” stated Emil Sayegh, General Manager of Mosso, Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting Division. “Pangea’s services have a time critical component to the local communities and the non-profits who serve them. Our systems are designed to scale whenever our customers, like Pangea Foundation, most need it to scale. It was very satisfying to also see our vision for an integrated IT hosting portfolio providing value to Pangea in their pursuit of such a noble cause.”