Rackspace Sees Market Heat Up as Open Source Share Grows

Cloud hosting company Rackspace has been up to a lot of things lately, and it seems some of its efforts are beginning to pay off. The company generated $230 million in revenues in the first quarter of 2011, compared to $226.3 million the year before. And, while net income came in one cent per share lower than analysts expected, Rackspace expects revenue growth in fiscal year 2011 to outmatch last year’s 24 percent.

“The company expects 2011 revenue growth to better last year’s 24 percent, as it adds customers and from its new product OpenStack — a collection of open-source technologies that helps in deployment of software online and provides support to business”

The open-source cloud, and more accurately OpenStack are on top of Rackspace’s mind, but a similar thing can be said on yet another cloud company who had its earnings call recently. VMware, which experienced two consecutive outages in its open-source PaaS Cloud Foundry, has also seen tremendous growth: a 33 percent year-over-year increase in revenue that added up to about $844 million in the first quarter of 2011.

QLogic has also been doing well, and reported during its earnings call that revenue from products and services was up 51 percent, and sales of converged and 10GbE products grew by 20 percent.

Companies all throughout the cloud have seen tremendous growth as demand expenantiolly increases, and open-source technology is accounting for a bigger and bigger chunck. Rackspace is in a leadership position in the open-source standards space right now, thanks to OpenStack, but the competition is steadily increasing. For one, Red Hat launched its cross platform multifaceted IaaS CloudForms last week, and then there’s Cloud.com and Eucalyptus.

When it comes to cloud standards, Citrix is also heavily involved. Our news editor Kristen Nicole interviewed Kurt Roemer, Citrix Chief Security Strategist, who is the Commissioner on the Cloud2 initiative. The latter aims to standardize the government cloud.

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  1. [...] the open-source cloud standards space thanks to OpenStack, and the company’s successful ventures reflected fairly well in its earnings call this week. Revenue for the first quarter of 2011 was $230 million, and annual growth is expected to exceed [...]

  2. [...] Rackspace was also given time to discuss their piece relative to the market boost received by open source growth. This fusion will give birth to the Citrix Project Olympus that will primarily concentrate on [...]

  3. [...] The cloud’s open-source movement has several major players leading charge, and OpenStack is among the biggest. Thanks to the cost-effectiveness of the open source cloud as well as its other benefits, companies are showing growing interest in this field, which means good business for Rackspace. [...]