Rackspace Hosting to expand in Montgomery County

Rackspace Hosting plans to spend $5.5 million in expanding an IT hosting operation in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Montgomery County.

The expansion could create more than 100 new jobs at the Blacksburg-area office, the company said.

Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack, a open-source operating system for cloud computing. Based in San Antonio, the company has more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents. 

Jim Cheng, Virginia’s secretary of commerce and trade, said Rackspace is one of more than 700 data processing, hosting and related businesses in the state, employing more than 11,000 people.

“The pool of critical technical talent provided by Virginia Tech, Radford, the University of Virginia, and James Madison University has helped the Blacksburg office grow into a large Rackspace development center,” Robert McAden, business operations manager for Rackspace, said in a statement.

  The Virginia Economic Development Partnership worked with the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development and the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center to secure the project for Virginia. Through its Virginia Jobs Investment Program, the Virginia Department of Business Assistance will provide funding and services to support the company’s recruitment, training and retraining activities.