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Fanatical Support, Open Source and Standards Key to Cloud Computing Success

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, California. To view the entire library of videos from other industry shows, Road Shows and product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit TMCnet Videos home page.)

In the world of cloud computing, there are a lot of very new companies vying for a successful spot in the on-demand services market. There are also some players who have been around for quite a while, successfully transitioning from traditional hosting to newer concepts.

An example of the latter is Rackspace Cloud, a division of Rackspace Hosting (News - Alert), which has been offering off-premise hosting services since the 1990s. Back then, Rackspace Cloud Evangelist, Jim Battenberg recalls, many hosting companies came out of the woodwork and most are long gone.

Rackspace, though, has stuck around and is riding a wave of success driven by virtualization, ubiquitous high-speed bandwidth, and Moore’s Law of falling prices for computing. The long and short of it are that economics are behind the motivation of many companies to move IT off-premise into the cloud.

“Many companies are looking at cloud computing as an alternative way to do business and as a much more economical way to host mission-critical applications,” Battenberg said in a recent TMCnet video interview. 

Virtualization, Battenberg noted, is what allows computing-on-demand. It’s now possible to get a server up and running in a matter of minutes; something that once took days. The most popular use of this technology is deployment of software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) offerings, things like hosted e-mail and CRM applications.

From where Rackspace sits, though, best strategy for success in cloud computing is not just focusing on technology, but building a business based on fanatical support.

“We are intending to build one of the world’s greatest service companies, and we happen to host on the backside of that,” Battenberg said. “Fanatical support is a core value for everyone in our company.”

On top of fanatical support, Battenberg sees open source solutions, paired with standards, playing a key role in Rackspace’s future success. The company is actively working on an initiative to promote a secure, standards-based cloud.

“We want the community as a whole to build on the open source cloud so there’s not vendor lock-in in the future,” Battenberg said.

During the video interview, Battenberg also spoke about hybrid solutions that combine traditional managed hosting with the cloud, the challenges associated with on-demand services for PCI (News - Alert)-compliant data, and other topics.