Maybe the third time will be a charm for Rackspace's CEO position? Managed-hosting company Rackspace announced this week that it has named its third CEO in two years.
Kevin Jones, who most recently served as CEO of Dallas-based MV Transportation, is taking over the top spot at Rackspace by replacing Joe Eazor. Eazor, who was formerly CEO and president of EarthLink, was named CEO in May 2017 after the previous CEO, Taylor Rhodes, left the company.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Kevin as the CEO of Rackspace,” said David Sambur, chairman of the Rackspace board of directors, in a prepared statement. “He has an outstanding track record of leading and transforming businesses by inspiring organizations to increase revenue, profitability, market share, customer satisfaction and employee engagement."
Sambur had kind words for Eazor by thanking him for guiding Rackspace through three acquisitions, TriCore, Datapipe and RelationEdge, while building "a truly world-class leadership team around him" and for helping crystallize Rackspace’s strategy. Rackspace didn't say why Eazor left.
RELATED: Rackspace's shares drop after it ditches plans to sell company
"Joe also has instilled financial and operational disciplines that will help the company scale into the future," Sambur said of Eazor.
Sambur is a senior partner at Apollo Global Management, which is the private equity firm that bought San Antonio-based Rackspace for $4.3 billion three years ago. While Rackspace was one of the early pioneers in the cloud space, it has since been overshadowed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.
Before joining MV Transportation, Jones held leadership roles at DXC Technology, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell, Hewlett Packard (HP) and Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
At DXC and HPE, Jones and his team transformed the Americas into the company’s most profitable region. Before joining DXC and HPE, he served as chief customer and sales officer for Dell Services, where he led all go-to-market functions for applications, business process outsourcing, infrastructure services and cloud computing businesses.
Jones previously spent 21 years in executive positions at HP and EDS in both Europe and Asia.