London, UK – Rackspace, a leading provider of hosted IT services, today announced Adknowledge, an online behavioural targeting technology company, as its 4000th European customer, highlighting its success in becoming one of the fastest growing IT services company in the region.

Based on its robust infrastructure, scalable storage offering and ability to deliver IT service solutions, Rackspace has been selected by Adknowledge to aid it in the launch of two new products – TaglinesTM and Cubics Social advertising. Taglines inserts behaviourally targeted logos and text links to user generated emails, newsletters and news alerts, turning what is essentially an existing cost base into a brand new revenue stream for UGC publishers and ISP’s with large volumes of user generated email. Cubics, the social advertising channel of Adknowledge serves targeted ad inventory across hundreds of social media applications, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo platforms.

Rackspace today also announced two high-level appointments – Florian Schiebl as European business director, and Tarquin Bellinger as sales director, to reinforce its European operations. Prior to joining Rackspace, Schiebl was managing director of iPass, being responsible for the Central and Eastern European regions. He has also held positions at Bertelsmann, Compaq, Siemens, COLT Telecom and MFN.

Bellinger has joined Rackspace to lead the Sales and Solutions Engineering team. His previous position was at BT, where he led the company’s 21st Century Network business development programme. Prior to that, he led Cable & Wireless’ global services business division focusing on financial markets, based in New York.

Doug Loewe, Managing Director, Rackspace EMEA, commented, “These are very exciting times for us as reaching the 4000th customer is an accolade we are very proud of. I feel confident that our belief in delivering Fanatical Support for our customers will continue to lead to success. While it’s far easier to focus on technology, exceeding customer expectation is the real challenge, which is why we are absolutely committed to customer service. We are delighted to have Adknowledge as one of our customers and look forward to a fruitful relationship with them.”

John Cole, managing director, Adknowledge UK, adds: “We require instant access to over 15 terabytes of behavioural targeting data in the USA and so we knew that we would need a reliable data hosting provider in the UK to help us grow our data set in Europe. Rackspace fit the specifications of our brief and were well within budget, so we went live in December 2007. We have been very impressed by the service so far.”