Rackspace Monday rolled out a product certification program for partners using its private cloud service. The two certifications, unveiled at the opening of the OpenStack Design Summit in San Diego, are designed to make it easier for new and old solution providers and businesses to use Rackspace's OpenStack private cloud service.

Rackspace Aug. 15 unveiled Alamo, its Rackspace Private Cloud with OpenStack software.

Rackspace wants to both foster the adoption of the OpenStack standard and make it easier for businesses to use its private cloud, which is becoming more attractive to enterprises that want the savings and efficiency of hosting data centers off-premise but the security of a specialty service cloud.

[Related: 7 Ways The Cloud Is Changing The Data Center]

IBM and AT&T last week teamed up to offer an enterprise- class private cloud service that includes IBM's SmartCloud platform and AT&T's network backbone.

Rackspace is offering partners two product certifications for use in its private cloud. "We will have programs where hardware and software partners can get certified to work with us using OpenStack," Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace's private cloud business, said in an interview with CRN.

The Technology Alliance Program targets hardware and platform vendors selling products and services with Rackspace Private Cloud. Eligible companies include those providing hardware, computing, storage hardware, networking, management tools and operating systems. Rackspace engineers will work with partners to validate compatibility.

The Built For Program is for software vendors building applications that run in virtual machines or vendors that manage the application workloads on a Rackspace Private Cloud. Rackspace provides a testing suite and hosted validation platform to verify compatibility of the application with the private cloud.

Rackspace also rolled out software development kits for developers creating APIs in PHP and Java. The SDKs will help developers provide documentation to create code for cloud applications.

PUBLISHED OCT. 15, 2012