For Sale: Rackspace. But who would buy it?

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Rackspace has received multiple inquiries about strategic investments or a potential sale to another company, the New York Times has reported. To help the company evaluate its options, it has hired banking giant Morgan Stanley. It’s got Cloud Chronicles thinking: Who would be in the market to buy Rackspace?

First some background on Rackspace: The company has its roots in managed hosting, but during the past half dozen years has broadened its focus to now cover cloud computing as well. Rackspace is synonymous with OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform after it started the initiative with NASA four years ago…

So, if Racskpace gets sold (and it’s not definite that will actually happen by the way), then whoever buys the company is getting a couple things.

1) Lots of data centers, servers, capacity and, of course, fanatical support. The company has not been willing to play the race to the bottom game on cloud pricing and instead has focused on higher service-oriented approach. Whoever is buying Rackspace is buying a lot of data centers though. 2) OpenStack. Whoever buys Rackspace is buying into the OpenStack world. Rackspace has bet its public cloud farm on OpenStack, and whatever happens to Rackspace in the future will likely revolve around OpenStack.

See more at: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/85424#sthash.h7TQHkpj.dpuf

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