How Rackspace Plans to Win the Cloud War
February 21, 2014
Grazed from Fool. Author: Adrian Campos.
In the last month, shares of Rackspace Hosting have underperformed against other cloud-computing peers. The company took a beating after the news of the departure of co-founder and CEO Lanham Napier. Napier, who joined Rackspace in 2000, took the company’s top line from $1.5 million to $1.5 billion in 2013.
Under his leadership, the company became a global leader in offering hosting services, from managed servers to hybrid cloud, with hundreds of thousands of customers using Rackspace for their IT needs. However, the company now appears to be caught in the middle of a fierce fight for the promising cloud market, where giants such as Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN ) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) continue investing heavily in technology to capture market share. In this difficult environment, how does Rackspace plan to continue increasing its top line?…
The cloud war
The company’s biggest problem appears to be how it will fend off an increasing number of larger players competing for cloud customers. Amazon, which has more than 70 job openings in sales related to Amazon Web Services, is a strong competitor in the cloud-computing business. Its cloud-based hosting platform has become an indispensable tool for start-ups, thanks to Amazon’s policy of giving one-year free trials to software developers. Google, which released its cloud platform early in 2013, is another must-watch. As the owner of the most popular search engine, the Internet giant’s experience in mass infrastructure is unique…
Read more from the source @ http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/21/is-rackspace-hosting-losing-the-cloud-war.aspx
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