“The reports of [hosting’s] death are greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

I have spent my entire career in the hosting industry, and this month marks the start of my third year as a Racker. When you’re done reading this, you should understand why it is good for an underdog to win … only to be rewarded with a new underdog crown … on a massively larger field of play. Yes, I am proud to be a Racker!

My journey began as a financial analyst at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and continued as lead analyst for this sector at Goldman Sachs. Working at one of the most iconic firms in the financial services industry gave me a front row seat to the birth of game changing IT firms such as Webex, Salesforce.com, and of course many “no longer with us” firms in, and outside of IT, like Pets.com. All of these firms needed web hosting. It was this simple understanding of the universal need for hosting that allowed me to have complete confidence in the sector’s three cyclical peaks and valleys in the past decade.

Rackspace was born during those same fascinating days of the late 1990s. Like so many other “dot com” companies, it was on file for an IPO around the turn of the century. Since Rackspace was one of the few “dot coms” that was profitable, and certainly the only managed hosting firm to be profitable, I became curious to learn more. After leaving Goldman to found Tier 1 Research, I was eager to visit San Antonio, Texas to better understand the company that first embraced support as their key differentiator amidst a hugely competitive industry. So, in early 2001, I was pleased to fly from Northwest’s hub airport in my home state of Minnesota, to what I recall being a five gate satellite airport in this big city of San Antonio.

Picking me up at the airport was no other than Graham Weston, current Chairman, but who then was CEO. Having met a few billionaires from my time on Wall Street living in New York, it was inspiring to meet such a wealthy man from a family legacy of hard workers and find him to be so down to earth as to pick me up from the airport. Good thing too … the tiny SAT airport had no taxi’s waiting for passengers and would have required a phone call just to get a taxi to pick me up!

What happened over the next 48 hours in San Antonio will live with me forever. Everyone I met from Lanham Napier (then CFO, now CEO), to Lew Moorman (President), to Madel Robles … everyone was so damn happy! They loved their job. They had pride in their company. They understood their mission, which was called the same thing then as it is now … Fanatical Support®.

In my months and years following that visit, Rackspace made me look like a genius with their sustained success for writing research reports to my subscribing clients concluding that this underdog from San Antonio would someday rival the giants. With each passing year in the past decade, Rackspace came closer to being the dominant provider in a sizable IT category referred to as managed hosting. Then came “cloud!”

I recall writing about the formation of Mosso (the original brand name Rackspace assigned to its cloud initiatives in 2005). While I raved about Rackspace for this move, in retrospect, that was perhaps my greatest underestimation of an opinion as I ever had as an analyst. I say this because the cloud made me want to become a Racker. Simply put, without cloud, Rackspace would be the market share leader of a small category of overall IT. Instead, Rackspace has graduated to being an underdog once again, but this time … across all of IT.

You see, the CIOs of the Fortune 500 firms never took the time to get to know the executives or roadmap of the firms who hosted their company’s web sites. Even with Rackspace now hosting 50% of the Fortune 100 companies, it was an exception for a CIO to spend time with their managed hosting provider. Today, however, every CIO, even at the largest of firms, is crafting their “cloud roadmap” and wanting to speak with Rackspace because of our recognition as the service leader in cloud computing. We have a seat at the table. We have an invite to the big dance. We have the brilliant and beautiful spouse. Yes, it’s fun to be a leader while also being an underdog because ALL of IT is considering Fanatical Support®!

My role at Rackspace is creating enterprise alliances. This includes presenting at many large scale CIO events, speaking to individual enterprise accounts, and leading the exploration of which large IT firms will make the best partners for Rackspace to more deeply engage with the largest of our world’s enterprise firms. I spend a lot of time traveling to accomplish this mission. I am on pace for a 300,000 air mile year in 2011. That is simply what is required when you are recognized as both a leader and an underdog. And, it is a whole lotta fun when you have 3,500+ Rackers making your job easy keeping our 100,000+ customers so happy that they award us with “9” or “10” promoter scores on our NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys.

Some people cheer for their home team. Others cheer for the favorite, so they don’t get let down.  I have always been a fan of the underdog when the underdog is full of great people who rally around the right mission. That’s why I love Rackspace. Underdog and all!

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