When I think of RackSpace, the word “garish” comes to mind. One need only visit its home page to catch a flavor of the company attitude. It is a dynamic destination designed to sell visitors on its hosted or managed “cloud-based” Web services offerings. Now that we’re well into the second year of Scobleizer’s affiliation with the Web hoster, the time is ripe for the company to take a giant step to differentiate itself from a formidable pack of competitors that includes Amazon Web Services, VMWare, Microsoft’s Azure and Google.

Monday marks the launch of a new program at RackSpace called OpenStack. At base, it is adopting the principles of open source as expressed in Apache 2. That means that it is “open sourcing” the code that powers its storage product (CloudFiles) and will soon make the whole shootin’ match involved in the middleware and runtime software underlying CloudServers.

In this post Scoble himself calls it “the end of lock in” for the companies and individuals that have come to depend on RackSpace to for cloud-based storage or application hosting. But implicit in the announcement is the idea that a RackSpace customer will have dozens of peers that are using the software and are willing to share refinements, improvements, executables and (basically) experience with a community of other customers. Based on Scoble’s post, the company things of this as an extension of its high-quality customer service, spiced up with the rhetroric surrounding open source’s ability to counter vendor vendor lock-in.

My own belief is that RackSpace has learned as much from watching IBM as it has from listening to the “voice of the customer.” Its management recognizes that there’s a time to declare victory and turn control of the market over to its core customers with the understanding that they will benefit from being extremely “partner friendly” during this time of architectural uncertainty. It is a brilliant, and pre-emptive move.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Web Services, RackSpace