E-mail infrastructure service SendGrid has formed a strategic relationship with Rackspace Hosting, a specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry.

Thanks to this partnership, SendGrid’s email delivery, real-time analytics capabilities and scalability is now available to customers of Rackspace.

“We hear from customers all the time that they need a better way to send large amounts of e-mail from their Web applications and servers for their transactional e-mail needs,” said Nishan Sivathasan, director of corporate development for Rackspace.

Sivathasan said that after a long search, the company found SendGrid to be a prominent provider in the marketplace, as they beat out the competition across all of the search criteria. “We then worked with SendGrid to create a special offer for Rackspace customers.”

It’s usually an enormous task to build a reliable in-house hosted Exchange email infrastructure for transactional email. Company officials said that it can be expensive, time consuming and presents businesses with scalability challenges.

SendGrid eliminates the need to assemble complex solutions for transactional hosted Exchange e-mail needs when running servers at Rackspace. Moreover, it also improves business email deliverability, reliability and return on investment (ROI).

SendGrid’s new upgrade path for Rackspace Customers include the Bronze Plan; Silver Plan; Gold Plan; and Platinum Plan. The Bronze Plan includes basic deliverability features, access to SMTP API, Web API, SMTP Relay, advanced tracking and analytics features and premium support.

Company officials said that the Silver Plan includes all the features available in the Bronze Plan, and lso Advanced Deliverability features such as a unique IP address, additional API’s -- Parse API, Event API, OEM API -- sub-user capabilities, and the newsletter application. Gold Plan and Platinum Plan includes the full feature set of the Silver Plan, and also additional cost saving advantage.

“Rackspace and SendGrid share the drive for an exceptional customer experience,” said Jim Franklin, CEO at SendGrid, adding that the company is excited to bring its infrastructure and deliverability expertise to Rackspace’s customer base.

Additionally, Rackspace Hosting (News - Alert) announced the availability of the Rackspace hosted virtual desktop platform.