John Eitel has been a driving force behind the growth of Rackspace Managed Hosting into one of the world¹s leading providers of cloud computing products and services. John has provided the sales vision and strategic leadership that has been pivotal to the company¹s revenue growth from $15 million to more than $1 billion today. Over his tenure, John has progressed through multiple positions of increased responsibility and scope based on his consistent record of top-tier sales performance, as both a manager and individual contributor. As a result, he has been tapped to lead a number of high-level initiatives, which include turning around one of the poorest performing sales teams in the country, building a large-enterprise sales unit from the ground floor, and leading a newly established open-cloud business unit that has revolutionized the delivery and consumption of high-performance computing services.

John was recently promoted to Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Rackspace, where he is tasked with furthering the company¹s cloud computing mission. With a primary focus on Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Big Data in the Cloud, John leads a variety of business and corporate development activities, which include negotiating strategic business partnerships and identifying and executing acquisitions or investments consistent with the company¹s long-term vision. He was instrumental in the recent acquisition of ObjectRocket, an open-source, cloud based database platform provider, where he managed the post-merger integration and has been retained to lead the Sales and Business Development team.