Rackspace has acquired SharePoint consulting specialist SharePoint911 and has formed a partnership with Redapt, for which provides private cloud solutions for Zynga, Citigroup and Redhat.

Together Rackspace and Redapt will provide off-the-shelf private cloud solutions powered by OpenStack hardware, with Redapt carrying out integration, testing and configuration of its Redapt Merge Centers, while Rackspace will provide support and operations assistance.

The Redapt solution will be available in both the US and Europe.

Rackspace said its acquisition of SharePoint will extend SharePoint’s hosting capabilities in the enterprise market.

Rackspace CTO John Engates said Rackspace has already worked with SharePoint for a number of years and that its latest acquisition will enhance the offerings Rackspace has in the SharePoint space.

“SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers while increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure,” Engates said.

SharePoint911 was founded in 2004. Its team includes six Microsoft MVPs (most valued professional) among other leading experts in SharePoint solutions.

In 2008 Rackspace launched its own SharePoint service offering with scalable infrastructure.