By John CasarettoThe halls at Rackspace must be feeling quite different lately as another, actually a fifth former senior executive has left the company to join Austin-Lenexa based Codero Hosting in the last year.  The latest is Robert Autenrieth, who as announced today joins Codero as COO and Vice President, Technical Operations and Support.  He had previously served as Vice President of Global Support Operations at Rackspace.  His role at Codero will include managing Codero’s 24/7/365 customer support, data center operations and technical operations teams.  He is also managing the company’s data center strategy from design to execution.  This is a critical role as Codero’s brand is built a literal across-the-board level of technical excellence, value and support.

“With his extensive hosting technology experience, Robert is uniquely qualified to deliver on Codero’s promise of exceptional service through industry-leading uptime, expert customer support, and unparalleled value and performance. There is no one better suited to design and manage the Codero global data center footprint and customer care delivery,” said Emil Sayegh, CEO and President of Codero Hosting. “Robert led one of the largest teams at Rackspace with hundreds of employees reporting to him, making him an ideal fit to ensure Codero reliably delivers cloud-based services on a massive scale, always advancing our technology to meet growing customer and business demands.”

Autenrieth is deeply experienced and had been central for a number of years within Rackpace’s global operations across the board from strategic planning, customer support, product engineering, and everything in between.  Personnel have been known to move within the hosting industry, but it’s rare that it happens on this level to the same company and it typically indicates, vindicates that a significant opportunity and effort is under way under that new roof.  That certainly seems to be the case at Codero which continues to roll out unique products and services that focus on exceptional business value.

“This is a very exciting time at Codero and I am honored to be part of the team,” said Autenrieth. “As companies shift from internally-run data centers to managed and cloud hosting providers, Codero is perfectly aligning automation, operations, marketing and the right product mix to support the SMB and enterprise markets. I look forward to providing the leadership, strategic planning and tactical implementation necessary to take the operations and customer support teams to the next level ensuring we deliver exceptional service to every customer, in every interaction.”

One can only conclude that the acquisition of an executive with Autenrieth’s background can only mean continued growth for the company.  It certainly means continued product development from the team, and it also indicates a potential expanded base of enterprise data centers.  It’s opportunities in the cloud market that Codero has seized on, developing easy to use, easy to integrate thoughtful and cutting-edge technology solutions with great support offerings at a cost advantage when compared to competitors.  Meanwhile, Codero is continuing to grow and expand its team.