Rackspace Racks Up Customers, Posts Q2 Gains

The San Antonio, Texas-based company posted revenue of $319 million, up 29 percent from $247.2 million for the same period a year ago. For the quarter ending June 30, net income reached $25 million, up 43 percent from $17.6 million in the year-ago quarter.

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The number of Rackspace customers increased to 190,958 in the quarter, up from 180,866 at the end of the previous quarter.

Rackspace's growth is occurring as businesses increasingly use its infrastructure services to move their IT resources to the cloud.

Lanham Napier, Rackspace's CEO, said in a conference call Tuesday that the onset of cloud computing is driving an explosion of demand for specialized service providers, on which Rackspace intends to capitalize.

Last week, Rackspace announced its Cloud Servers cloud platform with OpenStack open-source technology, a move Napier said will make the service available to more customers and give it an edge in the competitive cloud services market.

As he had in the past, Napier criticized cloud service provider rivals he said impede the development of cloud computing by using proprietary technology.

"Both Amazon and VMware use the old model of proprietary technology to lock in their customers," Napier said. "We are taking a different approach. Our strategy is to leverage OpenStack technology to create a cloud operating system that can run anywhere, one that can give freedom and choice to customers and drive unconstrained innovation."

Napier said Rackspace intends to roll out more components of its cloud platform later this year with the launch of its Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Backup and Cloud Storage services.

PUBLISHED AUG. 7, 2012