From the beginning, Cloudkick has been obsessed with making life easier for system administrators as they deploy and manage infrastructure and applications on the cloud. In a short time, they established their position as one of the most advanced business-to-business focused start-ups in the cloud computing space and the system administrators tools they provide are recognized as best in the market. As Rackspace continues help customers manage their move to the cloud, Cloudkick will play an important role in improving the Fanatical Support® Rackspace already offers its customers. Rackspace’s mission is to be recognized as one of the world’s great service companies and we believe Cloudkick aligns very well with this mission.
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In the future, companies may hook up with more than a dozen different cloud services providers. Brokers would serve as intermediaries, offering such services as customization, integration, security, and aggregation. Through 2014, cloud service brokerage will generate more than $5 billion in sales—up from less than $50 million this year—making it the fastest growing area of cloud computing, Gartner said earlier this year.
The need for brokers is compounded by the lack of standards in the cloud services industry, which means that information can't travel between different services without specially written code to translate among them. "If companies integrate it themselves, they have no hope of saving money," says Daryl Plummer, group vice-president of Gartner Research. In general, cloud services appeal to companies because they're less expensive than buying hardware and software.
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There was a milestone buried deep within the earnings tables in this week’s first quarter results from Rackspace: "the San Antonio company has become one of a select number of companies that have more than 50,000 servers. Rackspace reports that as of March 30 the company’s data centers house 50,038 servers, up from 47,518 at the end of 2008. Of the companies that publicly report their server counts, only European hosts 1&1 Internet and OVH have more than Rackspace. Here’s a look at some of the providers with high server counts, gleaned from public reports and partial data from a recent Netcraft server count report:"
