Results show 74 percent of companies worldwide consider sustainability as key element of service provider selection; gap is narrow between US and international counterparts

SAN ANTONIO, April 27 — More organizations worldwide are building sustainability into their service provider selection and purchasing processes, according to the results from the 2012 Rackspace Green Survey, conducted by Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing.

Rackspace randomly selected 2,000 customers, of which 232 responded. This year, customers from 24 countries responded to the survey including participants from the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Brazil. When questioned on the importance of sustainability versus cost, a margin of only 8 percentage points separates responses from customers in the United States from those in the other 23 countries: 72 percent of US respondents and 80 percent of international respondents say that "greener is better."

Rackspace's findings point to an increasingly established trend to embrace and include sustainability practices within the purchasing process. When it comes to influencing purchasing decisions, 72 percent of the U.S. respondents said they believe sustainability is important in selecting a service provider as well as influencing a purchasing decision. In the rest of the world, 91 percent, build sustainability into their purchasing decisions on either a periodic or standard basis. Countries outside the United States seem to put a greater emphasis on weighting sustainability as part of purchasing decisions.

"Looking at this year's results, we are seeing a clear correlation between service provider selection including a sustainability factor and the weight sustainability has in the purchasing decision," said Melissa Gray, Rackspace director of sustainability. "We see sustainability expanding from a 'nice to have' to a 'need to have,' as companies understand that selecting solid partners as part of their supply chain translates into lower risk, more efficiency and more reward."

Adds Gray, "Rackspace views sustainability in a very holistic manner: that decisions should factor benefit to people, pocket and planet. We were happy to see that many of our customers also view it this way, with more than 53 percent of respondents echoing this holistic view."

To see the full results of Rackspace's latest Green Survey in PDF form, please follow this link.

About Rackspace

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and was featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the "2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting." For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

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Source: Rackspace Hosting