Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Rackspace

Rackspace Acquires Private Cloud Computing Company Anso Labs

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:38:45 +0000

Web hosting and cloud services company Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is acquiring San Francisco based Anso Labs. Anso Labs provides cloud computing consulting and services to clients. Anso Labs is led by Jesse Andrews, the former lead architect at Flock. And Flock was recently acquired by Zynga.

Anso Labs works on cloud computing with U.S. space agency NASA. Late last year Rackspace acquired a company called Cloudkick. Rackspace made $629 million in 2009 revenues and is expecting to show annual sales of around $775 million when they report fourth quarter earnings tomorrow. Rackspace has about 100,000 customers. Rackspace acquired Anso Labs because of their expertise with OpenStack, an open source cloud computing software project.

[AllThingsD]

Rackspace Acquires Server Management Company Cloudkick

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:14:02 +0000

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) has acquired a Y Combinator backed server management system company called Cloudkick. The acquisition details are unknown. Cloudkick started in 2009 and they provide graphs that show the health of servers. There are also tools that show what each server is doing. Cloudkick has about 1,500 clients, many of them in the Fortune 500. [TechCrunch]

Rackspace Takes Down Pastor Terry Jones’ Websites

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:23:45 +0000

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) took down the website owned by Pastor Terry Jones. Pastor Jones threatened to hold a protest and burn the Quran on September 11th. Rackspace said that the website violated the hosting company’s policy against “hateful speech.” Rackspace spokesperson Dan Goodgame said Rackspace was not acting as a censor, but took down the website strictly out of company policy.

“Our business relies on freedom of speech and we’re staunch defenders of that,” stated Goodgame. “What we have here is not a constitutional issue; it’s a contractual issue. We don’t think it’s censorship of any kind.”

Pastor Jones drew a lot of criticism by announcing that he would burn the Quran on September 11th, which is nine years after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. President Obama criticized Pastor Jones’ actions because he said it would boost the recruitment efforts of terrorist groups in Afghanistan against U.S. troops.

Goodgame did not mention the offensive content on Jones’ website, but he pointed out that the name of one of the websites that was taken down is called “Islam Is Of The Devil.” On Wednesday, Rackspace told Pastor Jones that he needed to find another hosting company. Yesterday Pastor Jones cancelled his plans to burn the Quran.

[InformationWeek]

Cloud Computing Becomes 10% Of Rackspace’s Revenue

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:48:20 +0000

Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is catching up with Amazon.com when it comes to cloud computing. About a year ago Rackspace Hosting CEO Lanham Napier said that Amazon.com was far ahead of them. But now Napier admits that they are closing the gap against Amazon.com.

Rackspace cloud computing hosting grew over 100% in a year and now the business is contributing to 10% of the overall company revenue for the past third quarter. The Rackspace Cloud originally launched as Mosso LLC in March 2006.

Disclosure: Mosso/Rackspace is the hosting company of Pulse2.com.

Rackspace Expects To Return $2.5-$3.5 Million For Monday’s Downtime

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:26:26 +0000

Rackspace Hosting Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is expecting to return customer credit from the major outage that they had this past Monday. The dollar amount that the company is expecting to return will be between $2.5 and $3.5 million according to an SEC filing. The cause of the outage was a series of equipment failures at a Rackspace data center in Dallas, Texas.

Several generators malfunctioned which put several servers out of power without backup. “We sincerely apologize for this disruption and know that it impacted our customers’ businesses as well as the experience of many who use the web,” stated Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier in a blog post. “Although we have had some issues with this data center before, please know that we will do what it takes to improve its reliability and performance. We owe you an action plan to prevent this type of thing in the future, and we’ll get that to you as soon as it is ready.” The data center in Dallas, Texas is 144,000 in square feet and is Rackspace’s largest facility.

Personal note: Pulse2.com uses Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary and we have been 100% satisfied with their services. Pulse2.com barely had any downtime and if there was, we were refunded immediately.

Next Tech IPO: Rackspace Going Public On NYSE

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:53:30 +0000

Rackspace is a web hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. Rackspace is getting ready to have an initial public offer on the NYSE with stock ticket symbol, RAX. Rackspace is opening with 15 million shares at $12.50 per share. Through the IPO, Rackspace will raise about $187.5 million. Goldman-Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Merrill Lynch are book running the IPO.

Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital own 27.8% of Rackspace combined. Norwest owns 11.6% and Sequoia owns 16.2%. Rackspace wanted to raise $276 million through the IPO, but had to target for a lower price because of the economic conditions.

Rackspace was co-founded by Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf, and (Update: see comment #1) Richard Yoo. Some of Rackspace’s partners include Microsoft, Redhat, Dell, Cisco, HP, AMD, VMware, and PCI.

Related Links:
1. Rackspace.com
2. GigaOM