Rafat is passionate about new technology areas where innovation curve is typically high. He has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise solutions architecture, consulting, business development, and architecture-led repeatable enterprise solutions.  He joined Rackspace Strategy and Architecture Advisory Services team in 2012 to support its rapidly growing enterprise business.

Prior to joining Rackspace, Rafat worked at Hewlett Packard as the lead architect for the CloudStrike team in the western area where he led cloud solutions workshops, architected successful solutions, and delivered many successful deployments and key wins for a wide spectrum of fortune 500 U.S companies. He also worked at Sun Microsystems (Oracle) for ten years in its Global Sales Organization as the CTO for the vertical industries. Rafat co-founded two start-up companies focused on providing innovative cloud technology solutions in Financial Services and Healthcare industries.

Rafat’s professional achievements include a pioneering protocol-driven network implementation for building Internet-based collaborative environment published in an IEEE research paper and distributed by MIT in its X11R4 release, Smithsonian Institute Award Nomination for Open Systems Platforms and a permanent author of the archive, and several leadership awards from Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems including annual achievements awards and President’s award nomination for technical innovation. Rafat is a frequent speaker in many industry conferences. Rafat Holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Old Dominion University in Virginia and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Cairo University in Egypt.