Rackspace Hires Dallas Transit Exec Jones to Replace Eazor as CEO

San Antonio—Rackspace said Wednesday it has hired Kevin Jones, who most recently ran Dallas-based bus and transportation contracting business MV Transportation, as its CEO. Jones replaces Joe Eazor, who had held the top job at Rackspace since mid-2017.

Apollo Global Management, which took San Antonio-based Rackspace private in a $4.3 billion acquisition in 2016, didn’t say why the company’s board of directors chose to replace Eazor, who was hired in 2017 to replace Taylor Rhodes after he took a position at Chicago-based software company SMS Assist. Eazor had previously been the CEO of Earthlink. Rackspace hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Jones has been the CEO of MV Transportation since October 2017. Under his leadership, the company achieved its highest revenue since it was founded 44 years ago, Rackspace says. Jones also helped MV Transportation strike deals, including a partnership with Uber to offer wheelchair-accessible rides.

Before that, Jones most recently split time between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell. Jones has experience increasing revenue, profitability, and market share, Apollo senior partner and Rackspace chairman David Sambur says in a news release.

Founded in 1998 as an internet service provider and web hosting company, Rackspace eventually embraced a shift to providing customer support for companies’ cloud and broader IT services, including for users of products like Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]) and Microsoft’s Azure (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MSFT]]). Since it was acquired by the private equity firm, Rackspace has laid off between 100 to 270 employees every year.

Rackspace has made three acquisitions since Eazor started as CEO. In May 2017, it bought TriCore, a Norwell, MA-based company that provides IT consulting, management, and support services to large businesses. Four months later, it acquired Datapipe, another cloud computing management and service provider that was owned by Boston-based Abry Partners. Rackspace said each acquisition was respectively its largest ever. at the time it was its largest acquisition ever. The company acquired RelationEdge, a San Diego-based software-as-a-service provider focused on aiding Salesforce users, in May 2018.

Author: David Holley

David is the national correspondent at Xconomy. He has spent most of his career covering business of every kind, from breweries in Oregon to investment banks in New York. A native of the Pacific Northwest, David started his career reporting at weekly and daily newspapers, covering murder trials, city council meetings, the expanding startup tech industry in the region, and everything between. He left the West Coast to pursue business journalism in New York, first writing about biotech and then private equity at The Deal. After a stint at Bloomberg News writing about high-yield bonds and leveraged loans, David relocated from New York to Austin, TX. He graduated from Portland State University.