Cloud support specialist Rackspace Inc. is rumored to be getting into bed with Amazon Web Services, so it can lend its expertise to customers wishing to shunt their data centers into the AWS cloud.

The Wall Street Journal says the partnership will be announced next week at Amazon’s AWS:reinvent conference in Las Vegas.

The deal sounds somewhat similar to the one Rackspace made with Microsoft earlier this summer, where it provides support and acts as a reseller for Microsoft Azure, with the option of hosting on its own cloud infrastructure.

The move would fit with where Rackspace is headed. Having given up trying to fight AWS, Microsoft and Google in the public cloud sphere, the company has set about trying to reinvent itself around its “fanatical support”, offering management services, even on top of other companies’ clouds.

Rackspace CTO John Engates outlined this plan in the summer, saying at an event in London: “When you start to blend Rackspace’s services and support into the mix, and those things become a bigger and bigger proportion of the check that our customers write us every month, the penny or two of infrastructure difference fades into the background.”

Rackspace needed to do something, because its financial performance has been worrying investors for some time. In its most recent earnings report, Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes admitted that he’d failed to lift the company’s public cloud revenues, saying that growth in the area “remained slow throughout the quarter”.

Nevertheless, some analysts are skeptical that any deal with AWS would do much to improve Rackspace’s fortune. Jonathan Schildkraut, an analyst with the investment banking advisory firm Evercore ISI, told TechTraderDaily the payoff would likely be less than investors are hoping for.

“We support the strategic shift to offer Fanatical Support on third party infrastructure, where AWS has dominated customer adoption,” Schildkraut said. “However, we remain concerned, as (1) the market for AWS support services is highly competitive, (2) leading providers in the space are generating only $100MM of annual revs (relative to Rackspace’s current $2.0B+), and (3) we see a long lead time to establish revenue generating contracts and secure lighthouse customers.”

“Thus, even if Rackspace were successful in building a market position – against an existing $2.0B+ revs business – the new strategic direction is unlikely to reverse decelerating top- line growth any time soon,” Schildkraut concluded.

Neither AWS nor Rackspace was prepared to comment on the reports.