Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is in the enviable position of growing faster than its executive team is set up to handle. The way out of that conundrum is to hire top-notch talent away from other e-commerce giants and put them to work -- and thanks to the company's rise to prominence in recent years, Rackspace is equipped to do exactly that. A lot of short-sellers may end up sorely disappointed by these improvements.
For example, Rackspace just hired David Kelly to lead international operations. With a high-level executive background from both eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) as well as a handful of entrepreneurial-minded start-ups, Kelly is the kind of proven superstar that Rackspace has needed for a while but couldn't get. Other recent executive-level hires include experts in finance, technology, and sales from brand-name backgrounds at Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), and Open Text (Nasdaq: OTEX) subsidiary Vignette.
This is the kind of talent that would go to places like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) or Facebook to take the next step in their illustrious careers, and now Rackspace is right up there to compete for the contracts. The company credits its unique corporate culture for many of these wins, along with a chance to become part of a great growth story.
Michael Long, who heads up Rackspace's global talent branding operations, explained to me that there's something about Rackspace that you won't find anywhere else. "You walk in the door and there's something palpable about the culture and of the spirit behind what's going on. It's not lip service -- fanatical support is something we live."
Rackspace has been hiring relentlessly, come recession or high waters. The company has gone from 2,000 full-time "Rackers" at the end of 2007 to more than 3,000 today with nary a bump in the rising employee count. Now the upper echelons of management are filling out to support those hordes of engineers and hopefully at least a handful of salespeople.
Quality management is of paramount importance to Foolish investing, and Rackspace is certainly doing its part to stay on top of the game. I've given Rackspace an "outperform" rating in our Motley Fool CAPS system, and you can do the same if you want to follow in my size 13 All-Star footsteps.
