Rackspace is making a move to mine a rich vein of developer services, teaming up with mobile-focused enterprises in a new scheme that sees it offer free “mobile cloud stacks” service for developers.

Essentially, the scheme involves a package of open-source technologies commonly used with mobile applications, run on top of one of Rackspace’s OpenStack cloud-servers. The mobile cloud stacks consist of a standard LAMP stack, with Linux, MySQL, PHP and Apache, alongside MemcacheD, the Varnish PHP accelerator and several undisclosed technologies that facilitate mobile applications. Once deployed, these mobile cloud stacks will serve as the foundation for mobile applications built on them, explains Rackspace CTO John Engates.

“Rackspace knows these tools, it’s already stitched them together,” says Engates in an interview with The Register.

Together with the new software, Rackspace is trying to build a new ecosystem of partners to work together and link software developer kits, testing, monitoring and push services. Initial partners included FeedHenry, Trigger.io, Sencha, New Relic, Stack Mob and SOASTA. Meanwhile for developers, Rackspace is believed to be offering an expanded partnership scheme – something quite different from contemporaries in the cloud server space like Google and Microsoft, which have developed mobile-specific layers within their PaaS offerings, or Amazon, which offers developers the chance to create mobile-specific stacks through its IaaS services.

In a separate interview, Engates told ZDNet that mobile cloud stacks should find some appeal among both enterprises and startups:

“The way mobile is being developed in both startups and enterprises is similar. For many, it’s the first time building a mobile application and there’s not a legacy with mobile and often a new team.”

Engates could well be right. As workforces become increasingly more mobile and tablet devices/smartphones grow ever more powerful, enterprises are quickly seeing the advantage of mobile features. With the launch of mobile stacks and its overtures to get developers on its side, Rackspace is clearly hoping to tempt enterprises to host their mobile applications on its cloud, rather than anywhere else.