A faster and more responsive technology backbone enables data-empowered farming for the world's largest fresh multi-berry producer

SAN ANTONIO, Feb. 16, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rackspace Technology® (NASDAQ: RXT), a leading end-to-end multicloud technology solutions company, today announced working with Reiter Affiliated Companies (RAC) to optimize IT workloads on VMware Private Cloud, resulting in effective data-empowered farming for the world's largest fresh multi-berry producer.

Based in Oxnard, California, RAC is the world's largest fresh multi-berry producer. The Reiter family began farming in the San Francisco Bay Peninsula and, by the turn of the century, had migrated south into the Santa Clara Valley. In the 1970s, operations expanded into southern California. Today, the family-owned agricultural grower produces Driscoll's proprietary varieties of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries year-round in the United States, Mexico, Portugal, Germany, Morocco, Canada, Peru, and China. The company has doubled in size roughly every five years and employs more than 30,000 workers worldwide.  

Along with the company's growth, RAC experienced costly operational challenges and inefficiencies tied to the occasional need for a manual scale-up of operations. RAC sought to globalize and standardize business processes by leveraging technology while improving application performance and reliability by migrating workloads across dispersed IT environments. The company turned to Rackspace Technology to modernize its technology stack and improve overall data accessibility by bringing together global hardware and its hosting footprint for its many technologies and applications.

Rackspace Technology helped RAC expand its email capabilities by migrating to Microsoft Office 365™. As RAC grew, it moved to Rackspace Private Cloud, consolidating devices in its Oxnard data center, and moving workloads to a more modern VMware® solution. Then, RAC reduced its data center and migrated from a legacy environment to Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware. RAC improved its agility with a geographically dispersed and linguistically diverse workforce. With its migration to the private cloud, the company was able to reduce costs and significantly increase performance within the same budget and build out a disaster recovery environment. 

"Looking back at our approach to IT, we were a little of 'everything everywhere,' understandably, without a clear enterprise architecture in mind. Our approach to technology was more reactive, supporting growth, but only when required", said RAC CIO John Thompson. "Now, with the right technology, we have gained real-time insights. Rackspace Technology has delivered additional help or expertise when incidents arise. The joint flexibility and expertise of the Rackspace Technology team enabled the company to use its resources better while elevating trust." 

RAC saw an immediate improvement in the performance of several applications, including its custom SQL application and backup solution. Rackspace Technology worked with RAC to consolidate and combine workloads while upgrading the company's storage capabilities. "The collaborative flexibility and expertise of the Rackspace Technology team enabled the company to use its resources better while elevating trust," said Thompson.

With a modern cloud solution and its access to expertise, RAC's technological backbone is faster and more responsive than before, allowing employees to invest more energy in the company's core business, and partnering with a trusted vendor to take care of the rest.

"RAC could reduce infrastructure costs and reinvest in other areas of its organization without increasing the company's overall IT budget. In addition, RAC was able to build out disaster recovery capabilities with little incremental cost, providing more performance within the same budget," said Josh Prewitt, President of Private Cloud for Rackspace Technology. "Rackspace Technology was able to help RAC consolidate workloads and migrate to a newer, robust, and more flexible platform, and do things it's wanted to for years but hadn't been able to act upon."

"Rackspace was able to go above and beyond, including having multilingual staff, which is a benefit given that the vast majority of RAC's frontline operatives and much of their team speak Spanish as a first language," continued Thompson.

To learn more about the Rackspace Technology and RAC partnership, watch their video or click here for their case study.

About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end multicloud technology services company. We can design, build and operate our customers' cloud environments across all major technology platforms, irrespective of technology stack or deployment model. We partner with our customers at every stage of their cloud journey, enabling them to modernize applications, build new products and adopt innovative technologies.

Media Contact
Natalie Silva
publicrelations@rackspace.com