Cloud hosting provider Rackspace announced today that it has acquired Sharepoint 911, a firm dedicated to providing services for Microsoft SharePoint. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition will give Rackspace more credibility in hosting SharePoint solutions to compliment its existing SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange hosting offering. It will also give Rackspace more of a footing in the general service provider market.

ServicesAngle

Rackspace is increasingly focused on services. About a year ago Rackspace acquired Anso Labs, a company dedicated to supporting OpenStack (and which was instrumental in helping NASA build the Nebula project). And yesterday Rackspace announced a partnership with packaging company Redapt.

I can think of a few reasons why this is:

1) Amazon Web Services is increasingly popular in the cloud hosting space, and Rackspace needs to offer more services to distinguish itself from AWS.

2) More conservative firms still prefer to start with private cloud architectures, and Rackspace wants to capture this market.

3) Services provide huge revenues for other IT companies, such as IBM and HP and Rackspace sees this as part of its future.

For all of these reasons, Rackspace is expanding its non-hosting services. And if Rackspace wants to be a player in services, supporting Microsoft products must be a big part of that. Linux be beating Windows in the server market, but Microsoft remains an important part the enterprise.