Today sees the launch of a revamped Rackspace Hosting’s new Cloud Tools Marketplace, which takes the app store concept and applies it to the Rackspace cloud services partner ecosystem. In other words: Need a cloud management platform for your Rackspace deployment? There’s an app for that.

The new update itself largely revolves around improving the customer experience on the Cloud Tools Marketplace, with better search, more screenshots, and demo videos, to help users choose the right cloud solution.

Rackspace senior manager of strategy and corporate development Ven Shanmugam says that the release of this newly improved Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace is especially timely considering that in a few short weeks, the hosting and cloud platform provider is going to be launching its OpenStack-based services. After all, OpenStack is all about customer choice on the infrastructure, and the Cloud Tools Marketplace is squarely aimed at enabling the same for services with over a hundred solutions listed.

Take, for example, cloud management. As OpenStack sees adoption in the data center for private cloud deployments, Shanmugam says that he’s expecting hybrid cloud management to become much-desired amongst Rackspace customers. That’s why it’s important that offerings like enStratus, RightScale and ScaleXtreme are available for customers to use. Moreover, thanks to OpenStack’s open API, Shanmugam expects to see a significant uptick in developers building solutions that are compatible with the Rackspace ecosystem, and it’s important that these developers have an avenue to show them off.

On Rackspace’s end, it makes their services look better if there are a wide range of industry standard solutions that are guaranteed compatible and preconfigured with the platform. But that’s also why Cloud Tools Marketplace vets every application that gets listed on the platform to make sure it meets standards.

Rackspace lists the following vendors as just examples of its partners:

• Cloud Management Platforms: enStratus, RightScale, ScaleXtreme
• Monitoring and Reporting: Cloudability, New Relic
• Application Deployment: Standing Cloud
• Security: CloudPassage, Dome9, StillSecure
• Databases: Xeround, MongoLab
• SMTP Email: SendGrid

Basically, the Cloud Tools Marketplace is to help reinforce Rackspace’s partner ecosystem as it leverages OpenStack to fight its proprietary rivals at Amazon Web Services and now Microsoft Windows Azure. It remains to be seen if it’s going to be enough.