Rackspace

The blockbuster announcement coming out of the first day of the WPC was a new partnership between Microsoft and Rackspace in which the San Antonio-based hosting provider would offer its style of "Fanatical Support" to customers running workloads in the Azure cloud.

It'll be interesting to see if supporting customers who are using a rival Infrastructure-as-a-Service product proves a shrewd move, or just the first step in the transformation of its cloud hosting business in an ultra-competitive market.