Dive Brief:
- Cloud service provider Rackspace is hoping to expand its business by supporting clouds from other companies, while offerings its own public and private cloud services.
- The company announced it will now support Red Hat’s OpenStack, its open-source cloud framework.
- The company also offers support and management services for the Microsoft Azure public cloud and Amazon Web Services.
Dive Insight:
Rackspace may be on to something. More companies are choosing open source products like OpenStack cloud to avoid getting locked into one provider. But Rackspace is betting many of them will realize setting up OpenStack and running it is much more difficult than they expected. Rackspace can then offer to configure and run that cloud for them in either its own server rooms, a third-party data center or on Rackspace equipment.
“The barriers to adoption of OpenStack are complexity and lack of talent,” Darrin Hanson, vice president and GM of OpenStack Private Cloud Solutions told Fortune. “We have a very prescribed view of how it works and we run 100s of thousands of nodes across public and private clouds. Our team has managed through all that complexity.”
The cloud market is expected to continue growing at a rapid pace in the next several years. That, combined with a growing interest in open source, may prove Rackspace’s strategy very fruitful in coming years. After all, the company does promise dogged and "fanatical support."
