Rackspace, marking a quarter in which it extended its vision for open-source cloud infrastructure with the release of several cloud platforms, reported strong quarterly revenue and earnings Tuesday.
For the third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2012, Rackspace reported revenue of $336 million, up 27 percent from the same quarter last year, and up 5.3 percent from the previous quarter. It reported income for the quarter of $27 million, up 36 percent from the third quarter of 2011 and up 8.2 percent from the previous quarter.
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"We're excited to report that the rollout of our new Open Cloud platform, built on OpenStack, is finally complete," Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace, said in a statement. "With the new products now in production, Rackspace offers a better, faster and more valuable cloud experience, built on an open platform that gives our customers true choice and control without the fear of being locked in to one vendor's technology."
During the quarter, Rackspace unveiled a suite of Open Cloud products, including Cloud Servers, Cloud Monitoring, Private Cloud Software and Critical Application Services to allow customers a choice of private, public or hybrid cloud platforms.
The San Antonio-based company also opened a data center in Sydney, Australia, and purchased Mailgun, which offers an email service that integrates cloud-based email services into applications and websites.
Technology Business Research analyst Jillian E. Mirandi said Rackspace's attempt to differentiate itself in the OpenStack market will lead to further gains.
"Rackspace's core cloud focus, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, is quickly becoming commoditized with limited options around product differentiation," she wrote in an analyst note Tuesday.
"In Rackspace's attempts to differentiate, it has shifted its cloud platform to open-source vendor OpenStack and has built in services, support and partner training around the platform," she added. "By offering services, support and partner training, Rackspace has the opportunity to take a leadership position around OpenStack where there are already many high-profile supporters including HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco and most recently, VMware, but not a lot of expertise."
PUBLISHED NOV. 7 2012
