An apparently “friendly” activist investor has increased its stake in OpenStack leader Rackspace Inc., ahead of a possible sale.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Harbour Group LP., has slowly but surely accumulated a 6.4 percent stake in the company since the first quarter of this year, having previously disclosed a 2.5 percent stake at the end of June.

The publication cites Blue Harbour officials as saying that a sale isn’t the only option – it would also consider supporting a stock buyback, as well as “alternative moves” to save the company. Blue Harbour managing director Todd Marcy said he “looked forward to a constructive, on-going dialogue on the various alternatives Rackspace has to unlock and deliver meaningful shareholder value.”

When investors talk about “shareholder value”, it normally means they’re looking to get a better return on the stock they hold no matter what it takes. Six percent is a pretty sizeable chunk of any company, and Blue Harbour will be looking to leverage this to rake in more dollars.

Yet Blue Harbour is also said to be “friendly”, because it doesn’t engage in public battles with board members, and will only invest in firms that share its ideas. This is in stark contrast to someone like Carl Icahn, who fought tooth and nail to prevent Dell Inc., from going private, or Southeastern Asset Management Inc., which gobbled up 22 percent of Sun Microsystems Inc., before forcing a sale to Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corporation.

Last May, Rackspace announced it had hired Morgan Stanley’s services to evaluate “inbound strategic proposals” regarding its long-term future. This led to speculation it might be acquired, although strategic partnerships could be another option.

Rackspace’s troubles come despite announcing record revenues in its second quarter – the only problem is its profits remained flat, even as it claims to have added thousands of new customers.

Rackspace began life as a web hosting company that jumped on the OpenStack bandwagon in a bid to seize some of Amazon Web Services’ cloud market share. OpenStack lets people build their own clouds rather than relying on titans like AWS, Microsoft Corp., or Google Inc., but despite massive enthusiasm for the idea, Rackspace has struggled to make its mark.

Building a cloud business has proved incredibly difficult, and Rackspace’s cause isn’t helped by the deep pockets of its rivals, who have been engaged in a bitter price war to gain market share. To compete, Rackspace has been forced to come up with additional value with services like its new OnMetal servers – dedicated, managed hardware on Rackspace – but it’s profits are still eroding.

OpenStack has had its fair share of problems too. Few companies have bet quite so big on the idea as Rackspace, which successfully developed the compute layer only to find itself having to buy up Anso Labs in 2011 and develop the lagging compute fabric as well.

The pace of development in OpenStack has been so uneven and broad that Hewlett-Packard Company recently jumped in and tried to and steady the ship around its own Helion OpenStack offering.

But the involvement of large companies like HP has led to concerns that OpenStack might be losing its soul, even if it makes the platform more viable for enterprises.

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