Rackspace Takes Page Out of the Old Microsoft’s Playbook – Partner Don’t Kill Ecosystem Players
December 17, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, Bleeding Edge, Cloud Collision, Featured Articles, Infrastructure 2.0, News
Author: John Furrier
Welcome back.
Rackspace is partnering with FathomDB, a relational database-as-a-service (DaaS) company. FathomDB is a service that will make the day-to-day operations of running a database much simpler, allowing you to focus on higher end tasks of your application.
This partnership is an extension of Rackspace’s ecosystem buildout (under Cloud Tools site), and at the same time answers Amazon's RDS announcement from last month.
[Editor’s Note: Michelle Greer has a post up on her blog over at Rackspace. –jf]
Amazon move with RDS is a short term patch to help them keep their position in the market. Now Rackspace is in the game with more tools for "MySql Cloud Ready" service with FathomDB - or as Fathom says DaaS. Rackspace now has an offering to make running MySQL easier on Rackspace. This speaks to the scale issue that MySQL has in the cloud. For cloud as a platform Rackspace has to continue to add value at the platform level.
Here is the quote from General Manager of The Rackspace Cloud, Emil SayeghL
“Ensuring that our cloud is reliable and scalable, and delivering a Fanatical Support experience to our customers and partners are primary objectives for us. We support strategic partnerships because they extend the power of our cloud offerings. By working together with FathomDB, as well as the Cassandra open source project, we are simplifying the challenging nature of scaling databases in the cloud. It is through transparent relationships like these that we can solve many customer needs; meanwhile our competitors are trying to solve these problems alone.”
What Does This Really Mean?
This highlights some key differences between Rackspace and Amazon.
1) Positioning:
Amazon is focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) verses Rackspace's Platform as a Service (PaaS); Amazon is innovating at the commodity level (Spot Pricing) while Rackspace is doing it at the platform level (Support and new capabilities).
On the competitive front Amazon is turning into a hosting company not a computing company. The end game for Amazon is to move from a computing cloud to a hosting cloud. Rackspace have already established a viable Platform as a Service (PaaS) on top of their infrastructure.
2) Ecosystem philosophy:
Amazon builds their own solutions disregarding the ecosystem (in this case RDS almost killed FathomDB as speculated by GigaOm) verses Rackspace who is actively building a community of partners and sharing the market opportunity
Ecosystem 101 - Partner with Allies Don't Kill Them
A piece of advice to platform players: please learn what Microsoft did in the late 80s and 90s with their developers. If you want a successful, vibrant, and profitable ecosystem of partners allow them to grow and then make them successful. What you don't do is encourage embryonic growth (startups and business partners) to develop a whitespaces and new markets then decide to abort them and kill them off. Hello Amazon as speculated by GigaOm in RDS and FathomDB example. Trust among partners is very important.
Rackspace business deal in essence saves FathomDB and ensures a healthy opportunity to add value. This is the big story and one that I'm focused on in other areas - Cisco in particular of late.
Ecosystems create companies and companies create categories of new industries. M&A and evil behavior create monopolies and self gain.
History Lesson - Late 80s early 90s - PC Revolution
A lesson in ecosystem history offers the best example that can be compared to the cloud computing market - The PC Revolution and Microsoft's developer strategy.
Back in that day Microsoft did it right. They were fierce competitors if your were on the opposite side of their religion - PC Revolution, but loyal and nurturing partners if you were in their developer ecosystem -everyone on the ecosystem side did great.
That handful of characters led by Microsoft (and Intel) created an industry. Amazing new possibilities, opportunities, companies, job, wealth, and value for consumers and users. The same opportunity is now with the Cloud Revolution.
Rackspace is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook - create a big pie and share it to the ecosystem. Back east we have a saying "you dance with the ones who brought you" - if there is a big market share with partners who helped create it.
On the surface it seems like just another announcement, but there is a big story is not just Rackspace verses Amazon.
It's about the future of the "Cloud Revolution" ecosystem. What kind of ecosystem do you want for th Cloud Revolution?
John, I like the comparison to what Microsoft did in the 80's and 90's with creating a ecosystem that created a big pie industry that benefited many. One difference between Microsoft's strategy and what Rackspace is doing, I would say, is that Rackspace has provided open APIs and open sourced the specifications themselves versus closing the ecosystem and locking in partners to their way. Thus, it seems Rackspace is taking the best of what Microsoft did and applying the lessons learned from the Open Source community that created the Internet itself. Hopefully, this creates not only a large pie but a community of trust as well.
Disclosure: I work for Rackspace, however my opinions (especially here) are my own.
Good point Robert in essence modernizing the notion of "industry building'. Very good point.
The big picture to me is this market of innovation which from my seat in Silicon Valley it's booming. The cloud is enabling many new and crazy ideas that need a chance. The big players need to enable this - VMware for instance has taken a ton of heat in their ecosystem by not being trustworthy and they are working hard to correct that. As a developer I want to focus on my application or innovation not put my attention to distracting things like spot pricing. The architecuture and offerings that the big cloud guys put out speaks volumes to their strategy.
This is what we are watching. No entrepreneur want to developer for a market controlled and dictated by a unpredictable market maker. Never mind the fact that after spending months or years developing they get crushed by their once partner - that isn't good for innovation and a vibrant, growing, and profitable ecosystem.
Your point about open source modernizing the approach for ecosystem success is great. Thanks
A disclosure that I work for Rackspace and am on a team of very valuable and dedicated people looking to build our ecosystem to best serve our customers.
I would like to point out that the adoption of relational databases-as-a-service including Amazon RDS, is good for FathomDB and is also good for the web in general. These services help evolve MySQL, allowing developers to focus on scaling their database instead of day-to-day operations.
The team at FathomDB is fiercely dedicated to pushing new and better features. This is definitely a company to watch.
This is the best explanation I’ve seen of why building a partner ecosystem around the cloud is so important.The knee-jerk reaction when Microsoft’s name is mentioned is to think of the "evil" company of later years, but they played a big part in building our industry largely by virtue of their partner/ecosystem strategy.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Microsoft of the old "Gates" days build a developer ecosystem built for geeks to create value. Microsoft only killed competitors never partners
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News