For Rackspace, there's no turning back from OpenStack now. As of Wednesday, all new customer workloads will deploy on the company's open source cloud computing platform, leaving the company's legacy platform for existing customers that want to take their time transitioning to the new cloud. Now, the competition to dethrone cloud king Amazon Web Services (s amzn) really begins. Or does it?
Rackspace is making a risky but needed transition. I’m going to be blunt and say that their previous cloud offering just wasn't very good. It was way too much manual interaction needed from their support and wasn't integrated into their enterprise managed hosting solution. I haven't looked at the pricing yet but, I think for Napier to say that their cloud solution will be priced competitively will be a bit of a stretch. Rackspace has never been a value play in the hosted arena and I don’t see that changing for cloud. I do wonder how that strategy will translate as they will need to compete with Amazon for developers as I don’t believe they have a hybrid cloud solution for their traditional enterprise hosted customers.
