Rackspace is in Austin today hosting an event at Austin City Limits, complete with BBQ lunch! We didn’t really hear about this event ahead of time, so we couldn’t help them promote it. Don’t they know who we are? (totally kidding) For future reference, Rackers, keep us in the loop. Despite that, every mover and shaker in the Austin tech community seems to be at the event and twittering. Robert Scobel even came to Austin for this event (although to be fair they are one of his sponsors).
The online video for this event is pretty incredible. Large screen, high quality video. It was almost as good to watch it online as being there (except you cannot smell the BBQ). So what did they announce today?
Rackspace is making investments in cloud computing in a big way, allowing them to compete with AWS, Sun, Microsoft, and all the big boys. If you put the “fanatical support” twist on a solid cloud offering, this could be a combination that becomes a market leader.
Rackspace announced a partnership with Sonian for archiving. They believe that regulatory needs will require them to have a solid archiving offering, and Sonian is it. They are also rebranding the traditional Mosso cloud offering to be named CloudSites. Their saying is “code it, load, it, watch it scale.” The company boasts 80,000 Mosso customers today.
CloudFiles is a new offering, and they’re announcing full availability today. You don’t need a Mosso account, you just sign up for it. The cost is $0.15 per GB of storage, $0.10 per GB of upload, and $0.17 per GB of download. Infinite storage, full REST API’s, and also a web interface. Rackspace announced the acquisition of Jungle Disk today, and it sounds like CloudFiles is the former Jungle Disk offering.
CloudServers is the brand name for the scalable computing offering. They are on-demand, instant on, and instant off. With this, they announced the acquisition of Slice Host, who has been out on the market for a bit already doing cloud hosting.
In general I think it’s a good call to make $10M and $20M acquisitions of very focused and complementary companies if you’ve got the IPO money to make it happen. The mega mergers never seem to increase shareholder value. Now that Rackspace has some solid money to invest, they could grow into a very significant player in this market space.
