Rackspace Not Afraid of Open Source OpenStack Rivals

Rackspace reported its fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2012 earnings late Tuesday, showing continued growth in its cloud business. Net revenue for the full year was reported at $1.31 billion, up by 28 percent from the $1.03 billion in 2011.

Demand for open source cloud technologies is so strong that multiple vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell and Red Hat among others, are all building OpenStack-based cloud solutions. All those vendors are also potential commercial rivals to Rackspace’s cloud business.

“I think it’s good for the ecosystem that these other companies are out there and from a distance, I think they seem to be doing well,” Lanham Napier, chief executive officer of Rackspace, said during his company’s earnings call. “We serve a chunk of the Fortune 1000, but we don’t serve all of them. So I think there’s plenty of room for these other companies to be making traction there as well.”

Napier argued that Rackspace has a significant amount of credibility in the OpenStack space, since his company is both the co-founder of OpenStack and the operator of the world’s largest OpenStack cloud.

“In this ecosystem, there is room for multiple players and it’s going to be a big market,” Napier said. “We want to dominate that niche and segment where people want a fanatical outcome. This is what we think we are uniquely capable of doing.”

Read the full story at Datamation:
Rackspace Ramps Up OpenStack Cloud Profits

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.