How Niche Cloud Providers Compete With AWS, Google And Microsoft
August 8, 2014
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.
Last week I wrote about Rackspace’s pivot from a pure play IaaS vendor to a managed service provider. In the article I questioned how the smaller, niche IaaS providers could compete with the “big three” IaaS companies and whether playing the price war game was a losing choice. I spent this week researching the answer to that question and here is what I found out.
Thoughts on Rackspace
I interviewed top executives from CloudSigma, DigitalOcean, and ProfitBricks and asked them about their thoughts on Rackspace’s announcement. Not one of the three companies was surprised with Rackspace’s move to managed services. In fact, Rackspace started out as an MSP before going head to head with the large IaaS providers and this area has always been their strength…
One executive speculated that Rackspace and the OpenStack community’s inability to innovate fast enough to keep up with the big three played a major role in the decision. Robert Jenkins, CEO at CloudSigma, had this to say:…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikekavis/2014/08/08/how-niche-cloud-providers-compete-with-aws-google-and-microsoft/